


Ghost Quest, Inc.

by Guede



Series: Ghost Quest, Inc. [4]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Bickering, Established Relationship, Film Student Iker Casillas, Ghosts, Humor, M/M, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 11:56:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4745441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Intrepid film students are blackmailed into making another ghost movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost Quest, Inc.

“We’re supposed to be taking notes on this,” Victor mumbled around Iker’s shoulder, one of his hands fumbling with whatever was keeping it from pulling Iker’s shirt out of his jeans. He grunted in irritation and yanked on something that wrenched Iker’s jeans uncomfortably to the right—more uncomfortable than they already were, what with them having been grinding on each other for a good five minutes already, and Victor sucking on his pen-tip before that. Which probably had _not_ been a deliberate tease, but then again, Victor was a hell of a lot more fun than his prickly, standoffish first impression tended to imply. “Iker, we’re going to _fail_ this _class_.”

“We are not.” Something hard pressed up into Iker’s thigh. It wasn’t either of Victor’s knees—pinned into the sofa back and jabbing Iker’s ribs, respectively—and it sure as hell wasn’t Victor’s cock, which Iker had finally gotten out of the man’s jeans. So it was the remote. Iker wormed it out, pushed what should be the ‘pause’ button and then went back to trying to get Victor’s stupid big head out of his stupid tight black t-shirt, because he was trying to be nice even though it wasn’t like Victor would miss one out of his zillion identical black tees. “’s okay, I’m making Sergio watch it too.”

Victor put his head down. He made a sort of outraged wheeze when Iker promptly whipped his shirt off, but after that he was still looking pissy. And his hands had stopped moving. “Wait, we’re going to use Ramos’ notes for this fucking exam?”

“It’s fine! He actually likes watching these kinds of shows!” Iker protested. He surreptitiously tugged at his jeans, only to grimace as Victor caught him at it. “He’ll remember all the details, okay? All we have to do is take him out for a beer and quiz him a bit, and tidy it up for the essay question.”

“I cannot believe this is how you’ve gotten this far. I—” Victor squirmed a little, then half-heartedly pulled at the hand Iker had in his jeans “—no, seriously, we are not—damn it, do you always have to do that?”

Iker shrugged and kept working his mouth down Victor’s neck, rubbing his tongue in little circles along the muscles. Same direction as his fingers were doing up Victor’s thigh, gradually moving towards the crease where it joined the torso and yes, Victor was still cursing and arguing, but he was also pushing his hips up into it. And his hands were starting to move too. Granted, still pushing at Iker instead of working with him, but if past history was anything to go by, it wouldn’t be long before Victor came—

“Damn it, Casillas! I texted you thirty times and left three voicemails _and_ told Ramos to smack you in the head if you forgot!” Cesc screamed through the door he was beating. “Stop macking on us Catalans and get your ass out here!”

That fucking shit. “That shit,” Iker muttered, collapsing on Victor. He was nose-deep in Victor’s neck for a moment, hot skin and racing pulse by his mouth and did he _have_ to?

Yes, he did, because he was a halfway decent human being and he had actually promised Cesc that they’d get him into that stupid party so the little horndog could keep chasing that girl from their advanced editing class. If only because Cesc wouldn’t stop stalking _them_ until he had, and Cesc-stalking automatically meant all the professors had their eye even more on Iker than usual, as if the constant drag-cloud of trouble following Cesc was Iker’s fault…but he had. Damn it.

Iker pushed himself up and got ready to apologize to Victor for the interruption, only to find the man already at the suspicious stare stage. “What?”

“This is _my_ place,” Victor said. “What’s he doing here?”

“I don’t know, it’s not like I told him to—fucking Ramos.” Next time his ex-roommate asked Iker to nurse him through another hangover, Iker was just going to dunk Ramos’ head into his toilet. Before cleaning it for him _again_. “Just give me a sec and I’ll get rid of—”

“And don’t think for a second you can just tell me to come back after you’ve bonked Valdés!” Cesc hollered. “The place is an hour from here and the party starts in forty minutes! And you already did it behind the coffeeshop anyway, how many times a day do you have to?”

Victor winced, blushed, and tried to shove his head into the back of the couch. When Iker kept him from doing the last one of those, he gave Iker a harder than necessary shove on the shoulder and worked himself into a sitting position. “I told you that was a bad idea. That bush was never going to be thick enough at this time of year.”

“We did not!” Iker snapped at the door. “That was necking! Jesus, how long’s it been if you don’t know the—ow!”

“I have neighbors,” Victor said, prodding the arm he’d just slapped. “Neighbors who hear enough about you anyway.”

That made Iker look sharply at the other man, but Victor had hunched over to try and pull his jeans back up so Iker couldn’t get a good read on his face. It could’ve been just a bad choice of words—Iker was used by now to Mori and Raúl one-upping him with tactless Villa stories—but these days Victor was a little bit better when he was just around Iker.

Then again, they weren’t really by themselves. Iker grudgingly hauled himself off the couch and over the door, making himself as decent as he could bother while remembering how close they’d been to screwing. He glanced over his shoulder to check that Victor was covered, then opened the door. “Cesc. We’re all Spanish. That party’s not getting going for at least another two hours, and you’re going to look like an idiot standing around waiting for your dream girl to show up.”

“Yeah, well, you wanna play to the stereotype, you go on ahead. Me, I’ve got plans. Plans that require advance preparation.” Cesc glared right back at Iker, his arms folded over his black leather jacket, his hair delicately spiked, smelling like whatever cologne the star striker of Barcelona was hawking these days.

“You’re about as threatening as Villa,” Iker mumbled, rubbing his face.

“What was that?”

Victor stalking up from behind saved Iker the trouble of making up an excuse. He stared down at Cesc, tugging at his shirt—one of the armholes wasn’t sitting right or something—and then he looked at Iker. “Where are you going?”

“I promised him I’d take him to the party the Basque film student group is throwing so he can chase after Daniella.” Iker checked his watch again and just got a glimpse of Victor trying not to look pissed off. The man was getting better. “Which I really, honestly thought we weren’t going to for another two hours. Otherwise I would’ve mentioned it.”

“Well, it wasn’t like we were really doing anything,” Victor finally said. He was still looking a little miffed, but he was also getting all antsy, pulling up his shoulders and directing his half-suppressed glowers away from Cesc. Of course, that was actually more of a reaction than Iker probably would’ve gotten if Cesc hadn’t been there, since then Victor wouldn’t feel like he needed to say anything at all. He’d just go stew in the kitchen with his iPod.

Cesc snorted. Then rolled his eyes when they both glared at him. “Yeah, yeah, you wanted to screw, I’m _so_ sorry you’ll have to wait a little bit for it when some of us haven’t even had a coffee date for months. Can we go yet?”

God. If Iker ever found out why his life was full of one annoying spiky black-haired twerp after another pestering him, he’d…he really should just get this over with. He put his hand on the jamb, then turned back when he remembered that he needed his coat. “Yeah, fine. I just need to find a couple things, and Victor needs to—”

“I need to what?” Victor said, blinking. Then he twitched. “Wait, since when was I going?”

“Do you not want to?” Iker stopped where he was peering down the back of the couch for his scarf. “I thought I…oh. Okay, I forgot to tell you, but I meant to when I came over.”

“What, did he take off his shirt?” Cesc muttered.

Victor somehow managed to look guilty and ready to lop off Cesc’s head. In all fairness, he’d been putting his shirt _on_ when he’d opened the door, but Iker didn’t think correcting Cesc was going to help. So he just dug his scarf out from behind the couch and then grabbed Victor’s coat. “Come on, just come. It’s not like if you stay, you’re going to make it to the end of the stupid film either.”

“I’d actually _try_ ,” Victor retorted. But he had his hand out for the coat, so Iker figured the argument was won.

When both their hands were on the coat, Victor opened his mouth again and Iker waited for it. But instead the other man shut his mouth, did an odd little duck with his head, and pulled the coat from Iker. He fiddled with it a little, looking at Iker.

“Just tell me you aren’t going to molest him in the backseat,” Cesc said.

“He’s not,” Victor snapped, jerking his head around.

Iker sighed and tossed his scarf on. “Why does everybody assume I’m the one doing the molesting? I’m a decent person.”

“If you were, you’d be too boring,” Victor said. He pushed by a blinking Cesc and went out into the hall.

“So…that how he says he loves you?” Cesc asked after a moment.

“He’s right, I’m way too nice,” Iker sighed, elbowing Cesc on his way out. He ignored the cries about messed-up hair and dropped his arm over Victor’s shoulders as Victor tried to lock the door. “All right, let’s go.”

* * *

Silva looked blankly at them. “What’s the matter?”

“My car’s got a problem and I had to take it to the shop, so I asked David if he minded driving us,” Cesc said. He looked blankly at them. “What’s the matter?”

Well, for one thing, Iker still hadn’t really gotten comfortable with the idea that Raúl and Mori were finally over their years-long mutual crushing society, let alone that they were happily fucking away with two other people. Who were Villa and Silva. Sure, he was happy that Raúl and Mori were apparently happy, and he would grit his teeth and try not to grimace every time he went over there and Villa made some off-hand comment that showed he knew how Raúl brushed his teeth or whatever. He’d even include Villa and Silva in his Christmas cards to the other two. But…

“Is Villa coming?” Victor asked.

“Oh, my God. I’m dating him. I’m not glued to him.” Silva pulled open the driver’s door and began to get into the car. “No, he’s not coming. Something’s wrong with the plumbing so he’s got to stay home and help Mori fix it. So don’t worry, nobody’s going to freak out Iker.”

“Villa doesn’t freak me out,” Iker muttered. He got open the back door and ducked in, then scooted over for Victor. In the background, Cesc hurried around the front end of the car to get in shotgun. “I didn’t know you got a car.”

“Didn’t, it’s Mori’s new one,” Silva said cheerfully. He had to cock the rearview mirror down to see Iker, and then tilt it back up as he started up the engine. “You didn’t know? He bought it like, last week.”

Victor slouched down and pushed his knuckles into Iker’s hip. When Iker didn’t immediately respond, he scrunched over to mutter in Iker’s ear. “He’s fucking with you, okay?”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Iker muttered back. “Doesn’t make it any better.”

“You want me to call Xavi? Make sure he’s around?” Victor asked.

“No. I’m fine.” Iker stared at the piece of Silva’s ear he could see. It was tiny and fragile and mostly hidden by the man’s hair, and totally didn’t look like it belonged to somebody who would take great joy in rubbing Iker’s nose in the complete deconstruction of his childhood innocence. “I’m not freaking out. I’m fine.”

He obviously wasn’t convincing Victor, but the other man dropped the subject in favor of his cell-phone. Which he tilted with a sigh so Iker could see that Victor was checking Facebook, not texting Xavi on the sly. “Hey. Is this the same party that Llorente’s talking about?”

“Probably.” Iker squinted at the screen, then grabbed Victor’s wrist and pulled the phone closer. The setting sun was casting a serious glare over the screen and Iker couldn’t quite—avoid cracking his chin on Victor’s shoulder as Silva pulled the car away from the curb. “Fuck.”

“ _Fuck_ , Casillas,” Victor snapped, wincing. He pushed his hand over his shoulder, chewing on his lip. His fingers pulled down the neck of his shirt so a couple reddish splotches were visible. And then he caught Iker looking at those and rolled his eyes. “Mess me up enough already without sticking your jaw into my back.”

“Sorry.” The car took a turn as Iker tried to straighten up, so he had to toss his arm over the back of the seat to keep from falling onto Victor again. “Though you know, I did take that make-up class last year if you’re that worried about it.”

Victor stared at him. Then he snorted and rolled his eyes again. He glanced out the window, then tugged at his phone-holding arm, which Iker still had, apparently trying to scroll down. “If I even see whatever it’s called, concealer, if that even shows up in my bathroom, you’re a dead man.”

“Just trying to make you comfortable.” Iker cautiously pulled himself up. When the car continued in a straight line and didn’t swerve him into the windshield, he let his arm drop onto Victor’s shoulders and scrolled down the page for Victor. Some interesting bull-shitting going on between Xavi and some of their other friends about the league title. “You know, what with your neighbors hearing too much about me and all.”

He kept reading the Facebook comments, but he could tell when Victor started chewing his lip again. The shoulders under Iker’s arm shifted like they were going to duck out, then suddenly settled down. “I just—” Victor started.

“Are they like this all the time?” Cesc stage-whispered from the front.

“Oh, hell no.” Silva sounded so affronted that for a moment Iker began to think he might not be a mini package of condensed evil. “Usually they’re in the middle of screwing by now.”

“We are not!” Victor jerked his shoulders straight, then yanked his wrist from Iker’s grip. He stuffed his phone back in his pocket so he could put his whole body into the effort of trying to will the back of Silva’s head into exploding. “At least, no worse than you.”

Iker almost added something about what Silva driving Mori’s car really meant, and then decided that one, he didn’t want to harbor the thoughts that comparison would require, and two, that retaliating was just going to give Silva an opportunity. Probably better to change the target. “Shut up, Cesc. Like we aren’t here just to get you laid.”

Cesc sputtered a bit, but thankfully, he was intelligent enough to realize that he did actually need Iker on his side for at least a couple more hours. He sulked down and went back to the preparation for his big plan or whatever.

“Are you kidding?” Silva said. “I’ve never even been in your place, let alone stained your bed.”

“ _What_?” Cesc screeched. “When did that happen? Where was I?”

“Choking on your own vomit in some club bathroom, probably,” Iker muttered, eyeing Victor’s wide-eyed, embarrassment-frozen face. Weird, since Victor had been the gung-ho one about _that_ round, but…right, time to head off the oncoming scorched-earth tactics. As much as it hurt Iker’s pride to admit, he and Victor were outgunned; Silva didn’t just have his own humiliating stories, but now he had access to all of _Raúl’s_ damn stories. At least when it came to a frontal approach. “Cesc, do you or do you not want me in a good enough mood to introduce you to Daniella? Because if I’m cranky, maybe I forget that we’re not supposed to talk about what happened with you and that slice of pizza.”

Victor snapped out of his personal stormcloud and arched a questioning brow at Iker, while up front Cesc flailed and made more panicky noises.

“Tell you later,” Iker whispered, and then got in a nibble to Victor’s ear while he was in the area. Which got him an elbow in the ribs, but Victor wasn’t exactly getting rid of Iker’s arm from his shoulders. And also, Cesc started talking about the latest refereeing conspiracy, so all in all, a good execution of the game plan, Iker thought. The night was looking up.

* * *

They could tell that something was going on before Silva had even parked the car. It was still pretty early, especially as student parties went, but there were already people crowding out the lawn and spilling in clusters onto the sidewalk. And they didn’t exactly look like they were having fun standing around either. Some here and there were holding onto bottles but it was a little cold to be moving the party outdoors, and anyway, it didn’t seem like anyone was actually drinking.

“What’s going on?” Victor wedged himself between Iker and the carseat trying to get a look over Iker’s head. “Did somebody get hurt?”

“Hey, there’s Llorente.” Silva rolled down the window and called out, and the big blond head began bobbing towards them. “What’s the matter? Is the party off?”

Llorente crammed himself down into the window. “I don’t know. I think so.”

“What?” Cesc, that horny idiot, actually got out of the car, as if he was going to charge off and find his lady-love, and save her from the bunch of gossiping people in the yard.

“I mean, I think everybody’s okay, but people are kind of…well, it’s hard to explain,” Llorente went on. He paused as one of the other Basque film student group people hailed him, then waved them off. “We’re in the middle of making sure nobody’s still inside.”

“Why?” Iker got his window down, then sighed and just opened the door. He couldn’t have a conversation with Victor trying to climb his back, and the window wasn’t big enough for both their heads. Across the way he saw Arteta and Alonso talking—Arteta kept pointing to the top floor of the house, which had a broken window. “Fight?”

Llorente shook his head. Then he let out an exasperated breath and clasped his hands behind his head. “Well, not that anybody’s admitting to, but I wonder…look, what happened was, a couple people broke into the attic—it’s been boarded up, remember, because the landlord said the staircase is rotten—and then came back down screaming. One guy, he fainted. Just woke up.”

Somebody abruptly sucked in their breath behind Iker, making him start. He turned around and found Victor staring at him, as if Iker knew something or was supposed to know something. Which Iker didn’t, but that didn’t stop the unpleasant crawling feeling that was going over the back of his neck now. And why that was happening, he didn’t know either.

“Said they’d seen a ghost,” Llorente added. “Chased them out.”

Oh. Right. That would be why.

* * *

“No, we didn’t go inside yet. We’re still all out on the—Guaje, listen, I’m not going to go inside, okay?” Perched on the trunk of Mori’s car, Silva heaved a long-suffering sigh and then dropped his head onto one hand. “Nobody’s going inside. Yes, you do too care if Iker goes inside. Raúl would be very upset if some ghost strangled him.”

Not that it particularly meant much to Iker if Villa was trying to will him to death again or not, or even that Villa had remembered Iker’s existence, but he was glad that even that moron realized he wasn’t interested in finding out what was going on. Realistically, it couldn’t actually be a ghost. The building wasn’t that old and he hadn’t heard of anything bad happening in the area, and given that the Basque students had been using it for a while, he would’ve thought one of them would have noticed some transparent person walking around. But still. He was fine with not going inside.

Somebody muttered beside him and Iker flinched, briefly wondered who’d seen him and then just said to hell with it. And then turned around and found out it was Victor anyway: the other man was looking at him with an odd expression, half-guilty and half-annoyed. Then Victor hunched his shoulders and looked back at the house. He leaned against the side of Mori’s car. “Why the hell are we still here?”

“No idea.” Iker checked on Silva, but Silva was still arguing with Villa about…something about whether it was a good idea for Villa to talk to Llorente. Cesc was long gone into the crowd, but Iker wasn’t exactly worried for him either. 

Okay, so Iker was still irked at the idiot, but when he wasn’t irked he did get along with Cesc. It was just that given Cesc’s popularity and the number of people wandering around, and the fact that Cesc was fairly good at looking after himself when not chasing after girls, the guy could easily get another ride. They didn’t need to wait for him. 

“I guess we could give him another couple minutes with Villa, and then ask?” Victor said. When Iker glanced over, Victor jerked his chin at Silva. “For a ride back?”

“Oh. Yeah, if you think a couple minutes is going to be enough for them. I’ve got my doubts about that,” Iker snorted. He turned around and looked out at the road, where here and there some cars were beginning to peel away from the curb as people gave up on the party getting restarted. “Or, Xabi owes me a couple, and I think I see his car over there. Let’s go ask him.”

Victor let Iker get about three steps away, stop where he was and realize he looked a bit silly and then come stomping back up before he raised a hand. “Alonso? Isn’t it out of his way?”

“What are you talking about? He’s three blocks from me,” Iker said.

“Oh.” Long, awkward pause, while Victor’s right hand twitched up like it was going to muss his hair, then promptly glued itself to the car behind him. His eyes dropped to the grass and his tone bristled with more unnecessary edges than Villa’s idea of hello. “You meant your place.”

For a moment Iker just…he didn’t get it, and he did actually try to get Victor so it was fair for him to get frustrated sometimes. He was fucking human, after all.

He bit it down and stalled by pretending to look for Cesc for a couple seconds. Then he breathed out and gave Victor a noncommittal shrug. “Yeah, you can stay over and even out for all the times I end up crashing at your place. Or I guess we can get you a ride from there if Xabi doesn’t want to go that far out of his way.”

“I’m not that far from Raúl’s house. I could just go with Silva, whenever he decides to go,” Victor offered. He was wincing even while he was talking. “I mean…”

“It’s not a big deal if you sleep over once, you know,” Iker said. And yeah, he was starting to not sound so calm. “I make sure Ramos keeps his trash on his side of the wall, and I did the laundry yesterday so you’re even going to have fresh sheets.”

Over on the end of the car, Silva suddenly pricked up his head, so maybe Iker’s sarcasm was getting a little loud too. Damn it. Iker really—he didn’t want to make this an argument. It was a stupid thing to argue over, when it wasn’t like they wouldn’t see each other at all if they went back to their own places in separate cars. And also, he wasn’t that fond of Victor in a funk and if Victor’s head went any lower he was going to dislocate his spine.

“It’s not—I never said your place was gross, okay? I just—” Victor started.

“Look, forget it. I just want to stop standing here and—”

And thank God for Llorente coming over again. Although he was going through the milling people like a man on a mission, and his eyes were fixed right on Iker, which was a little disconcerting. Llorente _was_ pretty damn tall, and right now, also upset. But that wasn’t Iker’s fault, so…

“Iker, I think Cesc just went in,” Llorente said.

For a moment Iker just stood there. Then he opened his mouth. And closed it, because asking why he cared was not what a half-decent person would say and he was fucking trying, damn it. “Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know, but we just called the landlord and he’s coming over, and I really would like to get people out of here before he shows up.” Llorente’s expression shifted from harried to slightly shifty. A bit odd on him, mostly because Iker was used to having to look down to find people not meeting his eyes. “We kind of…downplayed how big this party was going to be. I mean, we said we were having a few people over, but not, you know.”

“Yeah,” Iker sighed. “Okay, so you’re trying to get people out now and you need someone to grab Cesc.”

“I’m sor—” Llorente paused, blinking in confusion at this weird hissing sound “—sorry, man. But we’re all busy getting people to move out, and well, it’s Cesc. You’re pretty good at cornering him.”

Iker rolled his eyes. “That’s not really what I want to be known for, but I get your—” hissing interruption again “—I’ll get him.”

That was when Victor yanked his arm, as if it wasn’t doing perfectly fine where it was in its socket. Llorente was already moving on to the next group, but he spared a puzzled glance back at them. Then he was trying to shoo off a gaggle of girls, and Victor was shaking Iker like Iker didn’t have a brain which could possibly suffer damage from it.

“Are you crazy?” Victor hissed.

“No. No, I don’t want to go in there, and I don’t have any fucking intention of going in there, even if it’s a drunken guy seeing things like it probably is. But I’m not going to tell Llorente I can’t help him out because we got traumatized by a bunch of psychotic ghosts from the turn of the century,” Iker snapped. He finally got his arm back and put some distance between himself and the other man for good measure, only to blink when Victor came after him like some Catalan berserker. “I just—look, what I’m going to do, I’m going to go up in front of the place so I can at least see through the windows. And I’m gonna call Cesc. On the phone. Without going inside.”

Victor stopped just a bit short of trying to mash them into one lumpy body. He didn’t look relieved. “Okay. Okay, because for all we know, it’s real, and if it is, you’re not getting another fucking one of those things coming after you.”

“Yeah, not interested in that,” Iker mumbled, taking out his phone. He wandered a little to the left, where he had a better view of the first-floor windows. “I guess you don’t want to bust a lung running across campus again.”

“I don’t want to see you get dragged out a window again,” Victor said. Sounding a bit miffed. “I’ll run across campus if I have to, Casillas. It’s not that.”

“Right, forgot you didn’t want to stay over.” Then Cesc picked up the phone and Iker gestured for Victor to not say whatever the other man wanted to say. Which was petty, and so was the jibe Iker had just made, but…all right, Iker’s head was in an odd place right now. Because he actually didn’t quite know why he was so damn stuck on this and he wasn’t used to not knowing that—but to be honest he didn’t really want to sit down and figure out why. He just wanted to get the hell out of here before the night turned into a complete bust. “Fàbregas. Get your ass out of there before I drag it out.”

Cesc was walking around and a little out of breath, but that didn’t stop him from being a snarky little shit. *What? I thought all you were doing was just showing up to this thing. And since it’s not really happening—*

“Which is why you need to get out of there,” Iker sighed.

*—shouldn’t you be running home to bang Victor?” Cesc finished. He stopped moving, then made a vaguely puzzled noise under his breath. It looked like he was staring at something…up on the ceiling?

Then he moved behind a curtain and Iker couldn’t see where he’d gone. Iker took a frustrated step forward, only to have his arm get caught by something. He tried to shake it off while reminding himself that he had to talk Cesc out of the place before he could break the little shit’s neck. “It’s not happening because the landlord’s coming, and if you don’t want to get our friends in the fucking shit, Cesc, you’ll—”

“Here, just—Cesc.” Victor pulled the phone from Iker and twisted his head to it without completely prying Iker’s hand off it. “Cesc, damn it, just come out of there. What the hell are you looking for anyway? Everybody’s outside.”

Iker wriggled his wrist, but all he managed to do was contort his arm into a slightly more comfortable position. And Victor wasn’t responding to the skin-peeling glares Iker was giving him, so…maybe another approach. Like instead of pulling away from Victor, Iker turned himself across the back of the other man and draped his free arm over Victor’s shoulder. He felt it stiffen and Victor suck in a breath, and rolled his eyes as he got ready for another one of Victor’s intimacy issues.

*—said she left her purse in the bathroom,* Cesc was saying. Right. And of course he had to be the shining hero and make sure nothing happened to a handbag in an empty house. *I’m just—God, there are a lot of bathrooms in here, and…wait, not everybody’s outside. Iker is such a lying di—*

“I am n—” Iker started.

_*Aaaaaaaaaahshit!*_

Victor made a noise like a soprano yelping and suddenly jammed his shoulders back, knocking one into Iker’s jaw so Iker painfully had his mouth shut. Iker let go of the other man and stumbled back a pace, grabbing at his chin. His hand slid down Victor’s arm, then hooked into Victor’s elbow. By accident, but Iker made it intentional when the other man jumped for the door.

“Casillas, what the—” Victor snarled.

That gave Iker the moment he needed to yank Victor out of the way and push in front of him. By the time Victor caught on, Iker was halfway up the front steps of the house. Victor’s fingers scratched at Iker’s back, but Iker twisted out of the way. He got the door open, evaded another grab by Victor, and slid himself inside.

Front hall. Looked…like an ice chest full of frosted, unopened, probably refreshing beer bottles right in front of him. Iker shook his head, reminded himself that the point was to get out of here as quickly as possible, and opened his mouth—only to have the breath knocked out of him as something clamped onto his back and damn near slewed him into the wall. His elbow was actually jerking back to get them in the ribs when he picked up on the Catalan swearing.

“—idiot! Idiot!” Victor paused to breathe, and to loosen up on Iker. A little. Enough so he could get his head around and glare at Iker. “You said you weren’t going inside!”

“I—oh, for…Cesc! Cesc, you goddamn little shit!” Iker shouted, twisting his head forward. “Where are you?”

“I’m right here.” Cesc wandered into the doorway on the left. He was scruffing absently at the back of his head with one hand, while the other arm had a woman’s leather purse tucked under it. He cocked his head at them, then arched his brows when Victor gestured for him to stay where he was. “What?”

Iker started to speak, then had to put his hand on the wall, as Victor clutching his waist actually wasn’t a very good source of additional support while he caught his breath. “You screamed.”

“I did not!” Offended, Cesc pulled his shoulders straight and wrinkled his nose. “What, I tripped and whacked my shin. Is that what—”

“What’d you used to call your old carpool group?” Victor barked. When Cesc frowned at him and made to move forward, Victor fiercely waved his arm for him to stop. “No, no. What’d you—”

“I heard you.” Cesc stared at them for a few seconds. “The Quinta del Taxi? You mean that?”

The vise around Iker finally pulled off as Victor let out a gusty sigh. Iker took a moment to check that his ribs were still all where they were supposed to be, then glanced at Victor. “His what?”

“It’s the right answer,” Victor muttered.

“To what?” Iker asked. “He called his carpool what? Where?”

“Huh?” Cesc said. Then his eyes widened. He snapped his fingers at them. “Oh, my God. Did you think I was a, like a zombie?”

“No, zombies can’t speak.” Victor was starting to tense up again, hiding his blush behind a glower that could sear a steak from twenty meters. “I just—look, forget it.”

Cesc’s eyes were still wide, and now he was pointing his finger at them. It was slightly shaky, like he could really justify being that outraged. “You thought I was a podperson! Son of a whore, Valdés, what the _hell_ went down with you and Iker and that—”

“ _Forget it_ ,” Victor snarled, turning away. He reached for the door, only to flinch straight back into Iker when Llorente was…just there. In the doorway. Being all tall and silent and…there. “Jesus.”

“Sorry, man, but I heard shouting, and then you two went running up like bats out of hell, and I thought somebody was in trouble,” Llorente said. He surveyed the hall as if he wasn’t the one with a probable angry landlord on his back. “I guess it was just Cesc.”

Something happened to Cesc’s lower lip. This little twitch, as if that was all Cesc could bring himself to do in the face of a cold and unfeeling world. “You’re all assholes.”

The lights went out.

A second later, they were back on. Victor had a death-grip on Iker’s left arm, while Llorente was still standing in the doorway. Cesc was in the other doorway, his face not even out of its indignant expression. That was how short the blackout was.

“What a crappy party,” Cesc finally said. He hitched his shoulders back and raised his chin, and started across the hall. “All right, I’m giving Daniella her purse and then I’m…wait.”

“Weren’t you holding it?” Iker asked.

Cesc looked up from his empty hands, blinking. He was clearly meaning to give Iker a dirty look, as if Iker could have possibly taken it with Victor squeezing the blood out of his bicep, but then they all heard a soft thump. Then another one, and after a slight pause, a third. They looked up at the staircase to the second floor, and the purse came tumbling slowly towards them. It dropped from step to step till it finally landed on the floor, about half a meter from Cesc. Then everything was quiet.

“Get that,” Iker muttered. When Cesc looked at him, Iker irritably spat out his breath and bent to get it himself. “Look, just—”

Cesc got it. He snatched it up, but then dangled it from two fingers as far away from him as he could keep it.

“—great, now, _out_ ,” Iker finished.

Nobody argued with him.

* * *

They reconvened in the coffeeshop where Silva worked. By then Llorente had shaken off the creepiness enough to start acting a little bit of a jackass. He wasn’t denying that something weird had happened, but he’d start shifting around and looking away whenever the rest of them even went near “no natural causes.” And then he got up and went over to the corner to take a call from another one of the Basque students about the landlord.

“So anyway,” Cesc said, fiddling with his coffee. “I didn’t tell her what happened, but I told her it was in kind of a gross place so she should probably wipe it down and stuff. You think that that’ll be enough?”

“No. No, she’s gonna have to…get some…damn it, give me a second.” Silva finally stopped pretending he wasn’t texting under the table, pulled his hands on top of the table and looked irritably at his phone. “Like, some holy water. I think we’ve got…no, you—damn it, don’t be like that right now.”

Iker didn’t really want to ask, but it was probably better to know than to have Villa sneak up behind him when he was already on edge. Actually—okay, no, it _would_ be a legitimate excuse for whapping Villa in the head, but nobody was going to accept it. Because somehow a cranky little shit like Villa had managed to ingratiate himself by being a jerk, while Iker had been helping out around the place for years and years and everybody _still_ treated him like he’d tried to overthrow the government. 

Actually, that should’ve made at least the Catalans a bit more friendly. Politics wasn’t Iker’s forte and he didn’t pretend otherwise, but he could call a hypocrite when he saw one. Especially if he didn’t want to see them. “Is Villa coming here?”

“I’m trying to make him not. He’s—I mean, he’d know more, because he saw more the other time, but he’s still so touchy about it that it’s not really gonna be helpful,” Silva muttered, his thumbs flying over his phone. He cocked his head, then grimaced and abruptly slumped back to stare at the ceiling.

Cesc looked back and forth between Iker and Silva. He bit his lip. He looked down. He looked up and shifted his weight. Then he looked down again.

“She has a roommate and they went off together, didn’t they? If something weird happens, she’s not going to be by herself,” Iker sighed. He gave Cesc’s annoyed expression his shoulder and checked on Victor, who’d lapsed into one of his eerie silent spells. “And I’m sure you gave her your number in case she wasn’t feeling good and didn’t creep her out at all trying not to talk about ghosts.”

“I just want to make sure that she’ll be okay!” Cesc protested. He kicked Iker’s foot. “I mean, if something happens and I could’ve warned her, but I didn’t…”

“If you tell her straight-up what this is about, she’s not going to believe you. Just look at Llorente over there. He was _there_ , and he’s already trying to talk himself into thinking it was just some prank.” Silva pulled himself off the seat. He gave his phone a withering look, then went into a resigned slouch as he slowly hit ‘dial’ on somebody’s number. “Okay. Listen, Iker, I’m sorry, but Guaje’s ignoring me. So I’m gonna have to call Raúl. Either that or you convince me that you’re not going to squirt David with the seltzer pump.”

Iker could barely muster up the energy to roll his eyes. “He talked me into it that time.”

The look Silva flicked at Iker right then was—unnecessarily harsh, to start with. Also, felt like the other man was mentally plotting out the geography of each and every major blood vessel in Iker’s body for various nasty reasons. But Silva just put his phone to his ear and started talking to Raúl.

“I think she’ll be okay,” Victor suddenly said. He was staring past Silva, at the shop window, and so hard that Iker instinctively tensed. But there wasn’t anything weird out there—no strange faces, no flickering lights, not even an out-of-place shadow. So maybe Victor was just…thinking really hard. Something like that. “She wasn’t in there. It’s like with Xavi, right? He showed up outside, right afterward, but he didn’t go in and it never went after him. It just went after us. Because we _were_ there.”

“You sure?” Cesc asked.

“Look, this isn’t something I do, okay? I don’t know. I just—” Victor exhaled roughly and jerked his head to the side. He put his arms up and then down along the back of the booth, working his jaw.

Cesc’s brows jumped up and down, and then he started to get up, as if all the clenched muscles in Victor’s head and throat weren’t obvious signs that the man wasn’t just blowing him off. “Hey, look, all I’m—”

“The fuck were you assholes doing,” Villa said. And he might have been striding in like some white-hat cowboy, in his leather jacket and scruff boots, with his chin bobbing out like that tuft of hair on it justified it having its own swagger, but Iker was actually glad to see him. In a, Iker would rather be rolling his eyes at him than prying Victor’s hands off Cesc’s scrawny neck kind of way. “You don’t have anything better to do than drag David to some fucking haunted house?”

“Guaje, it wasn’t like that.” Silva got out of the booth in time to keep Villa from getting within smacking distance of Iker. “I _told_ you, nobody knew. And I was driving, so it’s not like they were really making me.”

Well, then, Iker’s legs were getting cramped anyway. Iker pushed Victor till the other man got it and slid out, and then pulled himself to his feet. He looked down at Villa, rubbing his chin. “So you ran all the way from the ER to save poor little Silva from me?”

Villa blinked, then glanced down. Remembering that his scrubs—a weird, kind of patchy pink and grey—were sticking out from under his biker jacket momentarily made him flush. He muttered something about Mori and flashy red shirts and rich people just buying new clothes instead of learning how to separate their colors and whites. Then his head went up and his eyes narrowed and his chin lifted so much that Iker could’ve picked him up by it.

“Guaje, you say it and I’m gonna crash in Raúl’s room tonight,” Silva mumbled. But from the looks of it, he was already writing off the next couple of days, slumping back against the booth and checking his phone.

“Say what?” Villa looked at Silva, marginally decreasing the intensity of his desire to flay skin with his eyes alone. Then back to Iker. “What, that it wasn’t like Casillas was saving anybody last time either? While we were running around de-ghosting shit for him, he spent the whole time trying to get Valdés in—gah!”

Silva’s head shot up. He looked at Villa’s shocked face, then down at Villa’s feet dangling off the ground, and then back up at Villa. Then he twitched himself out of his shock and sprang forward, grabbing for Victor. “Hey! Hey, put him down!”

“I am, I’m just gonna do it over here,” Victor said over his shoulder. While hauling Villa by the waist towards the door. It took him about another step and a half, and then he dropped Villa as the other man finally pulled it together enough to aim a kick at him. He pivoted in the same motion, came back two steps and then stopped. He shrugged a little self-consciously, then shoved his hands in his pockets and avoided Iker’s gaze. “Look, I know you two like being dicks to each other, so I wasn’t going to interrupt, but that was…well, it wasn’t true. And also, keep the rest of us out of it.”

Iker was grinning. “Come on. You enjoyed that.”

“I did not.” But then Victor ruined it by glancing back at Villa—outraged and trying to find a way around Silva, who was both blocking the man and desperately yelling directions into his phone for Raúl—and letting a satisfied glint come into his eyes. He finally got his gaze within the general vicinity of Iker’s eyes, even if it still wasn’t quite meeting it. “Anyway, you were the one who kept asking how to fix it. Xavi and I just wanted to leave it alone, and Villa knows that.”

“Yeah, well…” A couple of clearly caffeine-stressed students with finance textbooks wandered in just then, so Iker pulled Victor out of their way and into the little hall that went by the side of the counter back towards the bathrooms. “Hey, so I’m sorry about getting you into another one of these…these things.”

Victor blinked, then frowned. “It’s not like even Llorente knew. You thought we were just going to a party.”

“True. But I don’t know, it’s me and…maybe I should’ve guessed something was up when you said you’d come,” Iker muttered. He scratched the back of his head and watched Cesc finally amble over to help calm Villa down. For all Cesc’s protests, he wasn’t turning down a good Villa fit to go running to Daniela’s side—nice to see he hadn’t totally changed. “Should’ve been listening for the _Cuarto Milenio_ theme song.”

“Sometimes I think I should let Villa get a couple swipes at you.” When Iker looked at him, Victor was looking just as annoyed as his tone had sounded, which was way less than he should’ve been. “I’m not…trying to be antisocial.”

“Yeah, and I’m not trying to make you go or embarrass you or anything. It’s just nice when you do,” Iker said, shrugging. “I mean, your place is cool and all, but—”

Victor suddenly, unexpectedly grinned. He looked good even when he was sitting under his own personal hurricane, but happy on him had its own attractions. Really good ones. “Well, we can’t screw all the time, and that’s always what happens there.”

“Not my fault,” Iker said. He had to amend that under Victor’s skeptical gaze. “Hey, you’re helping usually.”

“Yeah, true.” Victor was…not moving, or at least Iker didn’t think he’d moved, but now they were close enough to nearly touch noses. “But you think we’d get more work done if we went your place?”

Iker just avoided being an idiot and bit down on his comment that it wasn’t about work, it was about Victor’s issues about—because yes, true, but also, not going to convince Victor to stay in his good mood. Which was such a good mood, in fact, that the tips of Victor’s bangs were drifting across Iker’s forehead, and—

“See? See? They always end up making out, and if that’s what gets them going, fine, whatever, but they don’t need to drag other people into their fucking foreplay,” Villa interrupted. Of course.

Victor’s face sharply changed trajectory and they were just damn lucky their noses and cheekbones got out of it in one piece. Then Victor sighed, ducking his head to hook his hand over the back of his neck, and Iker turned around in time to see Cesc and Silva both thwapping Villa on the back of the head.

“Not helping,” Cesc said. “Look, I don’t care about—okay, I do, I’m sorry, but nobody will tell me what the hell went down to get you two to date but I _can_ see that there are more important things right now, and I want to know about those first, okay? So can you just stuff it for a second, Villa?”

“Seriously, you went and banged Raúl right after, remember? Not like you can talk,” Silva added. Then he rolled his eyes at Victor. “I’m mostly on your side right now, but one, Iker doesn’t help when he baits Guaje and he so was, so he deserves a little too. And two…it’s been three weeks since he found out! Can’t he get over it already?”

“Or what’s going on with you two. Three. I don’t even know how many with you!” Cesc blurted out in frustration, staring at Silva. “Why don’t people tell me things anymore?”

“We’re getting evicted,” Llorente said, coming back to them.

* * *

After reconvening in the booth—which took way too long to figure out, because Villa wouldn’t stop being an ass and Iker justifiably didn’t think just putting Silva between them was going to work as a buffer—Llorente broke it down for them as best he could. The poor guy still looked a bit blindsided.

“So we had Xabi explain, and basically, we were going with, somebody got sick so we called off the party and a couple people just freaked out, that’s all. And Mikel says nearly everybody was gone by the time the asshole showed up,” Llorente said, spreading his hands. “But apparently, he went in, and then the guy went crazy and started accusing us of breaking the rules—”

“Besides the occupant limit?” Villa muttered.

Iker opened his mouth and got elbowed in the ribs. When he glanced at Victor, the man just jerked his chin at Llorente, who…was staring at Villa rather like that lion from the nature special two exam cram sessions back. The one who’d been watching a stupid mouse hop and skip through the savannah grass up to it, clearly too full with the wildebeest the pride had just eaten to make the effort. But who’d still been thinking about it.

“Yeah. Besides that.” Then Llorente gave himself a shake, blinked a few times and looked at the rest of them like they weren’t pesky little things which could easily be squished. “Xabi said the place was really messed up, so…if it’d been like that when we’d left, I’d understand. But it wasn’t, not like how Xabi’s telling me it’s like now. And the guy thinks we did it, and won’t listen when we tell him that we haven’t been in the damn place for the past half-hour. So we’ve got to get out by the end of the week and we’re going to lose our whole deposit.”

“That’s awful,” Silva said, wide-eyed, leaning on his elbows. Not paying attention to the way the fumes above Villa’s head were tripling. “And you’re never going to get another place at this time of the year. Everybody’s looking.”

“Wait, he can’t do that,” Victor said. “I thought the contract’s with your whole group. It’s long-term, right?”

Llorente rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I _thought_ so, but there’s some special clause in it and anyway, Xabi’s looking into it more since he’s the law student, but he says we might have some problems. This guy’s got a lot of local pull.”

“Who is he again?” Iker asked. “I probably—and even if I don’t, I probably know—”

“Thanks, but I don’t think getting the dean down is going to help us out.” The side of Llorente’s mouth twitched. “Also, not sure he’d want to right now. He, ah, well, we…look, Javi kind of is in his bad books. Nothing serious, just…yeah. I don’t think it’s a really good idea for Hierro to know we’re in more trouble.”

Everybody seemed to be out of ideas, because it got quiet after that. Just them staring at each other, except for Llorente, who was looking dispiritedly at the table. Silva was right, too. Housing was scarce at the moment and there was no way they’d be able to find anywhere half as big. They probably wouldn’t have a hard time getting everybody a place to crash for a few weeks, but that was still going to be pretty rough, and exams were coming up.

“So…this guy thinks you wrecked the place?” Cesc asked.

Llorente didn’t even have the heart to point out that he’d just said that. He just slumped and absently pushed at his hair. “Yeah. Xabi says the furniture was all knocked around, and there was this gross sticky shit smeared everywhere, and you were in there last. You know—”

“Nope, wasn’t any of that when I was there. And nobody went in after we came out, right?” Cesc said, shifting up. 

That sense of Iker’s was tingling. The one where somebody was about to suggest something ass-stupid and he was going to get dragged into yet another reason for Hierro and all the professors to think _he_ was the troublemaker.

“No. Xabi and Mikel were watching.” Frowning, Llorente pushed himself up and looked hard at Cesc. “You going somewhere with this?”

“Look, your landlord thinks you trashed the place, we know you didn’t, _and_ we know something weird was going on right before we left. And Iker and Victor have filmed weird shit before,” Cesc said. He pushed his hands across the table and leaned over them, his eyes starting to gleam under the fluorescent light. “So that’s it.”

Victor jerked up. “Wait. Wait, we didn’t film anyt—we did mushrooms! In the mountains! With Xavi!”

“We set up cameras! Then the next time something weird happens, we have proof that it could’ve been that too!” Cesc finished triumphantly.

“We didn’t film anything,” Victor insisted, shoving his elbows onto the table. He paused when Silva reached out and pushed his hands back, then resumed measuring Cesc for the dumpster in the back. “I’m—listen to me, we got out of there before we even turned on the cameras, and—”

“And as much as I appreciate you guys trying to help out and all, I…” Llorente pressed his lips together for a few seconds, then tilted his head, trying to hide his disbelief “…look, even assuming that this is down to ‘something weird’ and not just, I don’t know, some asshole sneaking in…”

Cesc lifted his eyes from Victor’s twitching, grasping hands. He blinked to adjust his face to mulish. “If it’s just some asshole messing with you, then filming it will show it’s not you.”

“That’s assuming the guy comes back a second time,” Villa pointed out. “What kind of asshole is that stupid?”

No response for Cesc, though the man did try for a good five seconds to act like he had one. He pulled back his shoulders and moved his hands around, and opened and closed his mouth, but stalling didn’t give him anything but time to realize that he didn’t have any comeback.

“Well, you do,” Silva muttered. “All the time.”

Villa…didn’t move, but somehow this change came over him, where one moment he was scowling because he was mentally dismembering people with scalpels and the next he was scowling because he didn’t know what the hell was going on and he was just some angry short guy in a café booth and completely knew it. It was almost too surreal to be funny, but at any rate, Iker was glad he was across from Villa and had a great view.

“Look, it can’t hurt. If whatever it is doesn’t come back, then Iker and Victor just have to erase some really boring footage,” Cesc said.

“Nobody said they were doing anything yet,” Victor snapped.

“And like I was saying, if it’s something weird, then how do you even know it can be taped?” Then Llorente grimaced and shook his head. He put his hand to the side of his face and rubbed at his eye, then blew out his breath. “Jesus, listen to me. I’m starting to sound as crazy as—”

Villa dared Llorente to pick one of them to focus on. Dared him with little arched brows and a spasming soul patch.

“As those nuts on TV,” Llorente slowly finished, his tone making it clear he was choosing to be polite.

“You should be able to film some of it. I mean, I don’t know about the…whatever’s doing it, but if you’ve got actual objects moving around like chairs and whatever, that should show up, shouldn’t it?” Silva was ignoring the way Villa was still trying to make him explain that earlier comment by staring at his ear.

“I don’t—” Iker paused to let Victor settle down, because yes, damn it, Victor could and had to look surprised that Iker was going to step in on this. Like it wasn’t something Iker did often “—I want to help out, ‘nando, but honestly, you’re right. I don’t know if we’d get anything, and if we really wanted to do this like a police sting, we’d need more than one camera. You guys have a big house. We’d have to rent out the whole student stock, and right now most of the cameras are probably out anyway.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” For all his earlier skepticism, Llorente suddenly looked disappointed in Iker. Then he shook his head and tried to work up a smile. He even gave a crushed Cesc a nod. “I appreciate the ideas, but…I think we’re better off working on finding a new place. And figuring out what asshole would do this to us. It’s just…we’re all pretty decent guys and I just can’t think of anybody who’d fuck with us like this.”

“Well, let us know if there’s anything else we can do,” Silva said. He started to go on, then cut himself off by looking over his shoulder. Somebody’s headlights were coming in through the front window. “Guaje, I think that’s Raúl.”

Villa had decided that the best way to express his dignity was to sulk. “You called him.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did.” Silva kept on the exasperated face for another two seconds. Then his shoulders crumpled and he sighed and started fiddling with his coat. “Look, it was weird tonight, I’m tired, I just…I kind of want to go before anything else happens. That’s all.”

“I—okay. Yeah. Fine, let’s go,” Villa mumbled, now also fiddling with his coat. After a moment, he peeked over and visibly slumped in relief when Silva beamed at him.

“So…how are we doing rides?” Iker asked.

* * *

Raúl came in just long enough to look dubious about everybody’s reassurances that nothing was going on, but he was in one of those moods where he didn’t talk and just silently made it clear he was going to follow up later. He took Villa—who’d caught the bus from the hospital—and Cesc, while Silva volunteered to take Llorente back. That left Iker, who could walk home, and Victor, who…couldn’t. Unless he wanted to spend an hour strolling the campus at this hour.

“So are you inviting me over or not?” Victor asked after they’d been standing by themselves in the parking lot for a couple minutes, staring at each other. He hunched up his shoulders and angled his head so he was staring from under his bangs at Iker.

“Kind of thought I did a while ago, but if you don’t know a standing invite when you see one…” Grinning, Iker took the half-hearted punch Victor gave on his left shoulder, then threw his arm over the other man’s neck. He kissed Victor’s temple and was a little startled when he felt Victor maybe push his face into Iker’s neck for a second.

Anyway, they got back to Iker’s place about ten minutes later than it normally would’ve taken, but the streetlights on one road were out and they had to take a detour to stay on lighted streets. And they did not make out the whole way. They actually talked about classes, and next semester, since Iker was subbing in an internship for credit and Victor was considering applying for the same thing when he was eligible the next year. Nothing weird happened.

Sergio’s window was dark, but when they got to Iker’s floor, one of Iker’s other neighbors was just breaking up a little party of her own and a couple people were in the hall. Iker had to admit it made him feel better; he and Victor hadn’t exactly been looking out for things on the way over, but he wasn’t going to act like Llorente and pretend everything tonight was like any other night.

Which was why he got wound up enough seeing Victor staring at his door to blurt out stupid things. “Figo went over the place, remember?”

Victor started, then flushed and looked away. “I wasn’t…shit, look, I really…”

“Goddamn it,” Iker muttered. He was mad at himself now, being the one making it complicated. He got his door open and flipped on the light, and then was even more irritated when he found himself hesitating on the threshold. “Look, I’m sorry. You want something to drink?”

Iker jerked himself inside without looking at Victor, then pulled off his coat. He tossed that on a chair, hearing Victor follow him in, and went into the kitchen. Didn’t turn on the lights first on purpose, because…because he was trying to show he was some kind of awesome badass, when he was a fucking film student and knew awesome badasses only existed thanks to movie logic and in the real world, those morons got their asses handed to them. Because the real world was not just fucking weird but also better at terrifying the shit out of you, and he had firsthand experience and he was still acting like this.

The lights clicked on and the way they flashed across the metal fittings of Iker’s stove made him jump. “Fuck!”

“Sorry.” Victor hovered in the doorway, tense and uncertain. He shuffled his feet while Iker turned around, then slowly leaned against the jamb like he thought Iker might deny him permission to do that. “You okay?”

“I…” Iker absently rubbed his hands against his hips, then pressed them against his eyes for a moment. When he took them away, Victor was still there, looking concerned. “Okay, I’m a little freaked out. That was weird back there and I want to know why all of a sudden we’re running into this crap left and right and I just…I’m freaked out.”

Victor smiled weakly. “Not showing it as bad as me, if that helps.”

At least Iker was still together enough to not bother answering that. He looked around, took a step towards the fridge, and then took back that step. “You know, if you want to go to your place, I’d get it.”

“If I wanted to, I would’ve gone when I could get a ride,” Victor said. A touch sharper than Iker had been expecting, and also a little closer. When Iker looked up, Victor paused, then went the rest of the way across the room. “No, I…well, I’m not an expert, but I’m not feeling like shit’s going down if I hang around. I think we’re okay. I think I’m okay with crashing here, anyway. I mean, if you’re not going to really freak out, because…”

“Wouldn’t be a point now that Villa’s not here to see it, I guess,” Iker muttered, shrugging. He pushed his right hand into his jeans pocket, then smiled at Victor’s eye-roll. “It’s funny. With him around, at least I’m too busy being annoyed.”

Victor snorted at that, and then leaned in to kiss Iker. It wasn’t—well, it wasn’t like Iker was thinking along those lines, whatever that idiot Villa thought. There were some times Iker spent with his mind on other things.

His hands went out to Victor’s waist, mostly to steady himself after his start, and it was a good thing since it turned out Victor wasn’t going for just a peck on the lips. A couple of seconds later Iker was pushed up against the fridge, Victor’s hands up his shirt and wandering into his jeans, too, and they were flat-out trying to live in each other’s mouths. Iker pulled at Victor’s belt-loop and that pressed them together damn good, but just not—he scrabbled at Victor’s jeans, then got his hand behind the other man’s ass and pulled forward. A lot closer there, and Victor agreed, running his palm up and down Iker’s back, his fingers dragging as they caught in the dip of Iker’s spine.

“Do you really want Villa to see?” Victor said, pushing Iker’s unfastened jeans down. He bit at Iker’s collarbone, got some shirt-collar in that too, and nuzzled it out of the way. “Seriously, like that’s going to help your problem with him banging—”

“Jesus, who are you, Silva?” Iker worked his way along Victor’s jaw and around the man’s ear, laying his mouth against the softer flesh behind its shell. He felt Victor shiver against his tongue and palm.

Victor laughed at him. Low, comfortable, not missing a beat as he twisted out of his jeans and dragged his knees to either side of Iker so Iker could get both his hands between Victor’s legs. “Iker, I’m, no, I’m sympathetic, really, I know it’s this big thing for you and you just need to, you’re getting used to it and he’s a dick to rush you, but you could at least stop twitching like that when he—I don’t even do that. You just—”

Iker made exasperated noises and sucked at Victor’s neck. Victor really got into one of those—maybe both. Anyway, he stopped talking and started groaning, and then the phone rang.

Fuck, Iker thought. And then he thought, there was no way. No way. Life was not going to do that to him. That would be just…ridiculous. Beyond unfair.

The phone kept ringing. Victor lifted his head, his eyes half-closed with the same kind of incredulous, disgusted frustration going through Iker right then. They were still mashed into the fridge, Iker’s jeans only half-down, Victor’s cock warm and stiffening in Iker’s hand, and…no. Absolutely not.

“We.” Victor had to physically fight down his irritation. “Last time. You know.”

“Never got off _on_ it, that was the whole—we kept getting stopped by…god _damn_ it.” Iker let his head thump against the fridge. “We need to answer that. If it’s…we should help, if we can. We need to see if we can help. Because I’m a nice person. We’re nice people.”

“I’m not right now,” Victor growled. He put his head on Iker’s shoulder. Then he picked it up and pushed himself off so that Iker could get the phone.

* * *

It was Xabi, sounding rattled. Iker had to tell him to stop and take a couple breaths, and to be honest, that was for Iker’s benefit. He needed a second to finish doing up his fly and check that he wasn’t alone in the room and just generally process the idea that Xabi was rattled. Could even be rattled.

“Is it…” After a moment, Victor moved his hands awkwardly. He kept reaching for the phone and then shoving his hand behind his back. Finally he jammed it between himself and the counter, and leaned on it.

“Still trying to figure that out,” Iker muttered. He put the phone back to his ear. “Xabi?”

Deep, calm, yoga-like breathing. *Hang on.*

The phone was passed over, and then Llorente came on. *Iker, this place was fucking clean. Xabi and the boys spent the whole damn night scrubbing it down, and I believe it when they tell me—*

“Not arguing.” Iker pinched the bridge of his nose. “What happened?”

*—came outside on the porch to talk, and we went back in and it’s all over—there’s this, this _shit_ all over the place, and what the _hell_ is going on?*

Victor’s hand squirmed free and made an aborted dart for Iker’s phone. Then Victor blushed and looked down and started muttering about not letting him have time to imagine things. “This poltergeist thing,” Iker told him.

Not that Iker had put any serious thought into it at all, because he was a goddamn _film_ student with a concentration in sports and that was what he studied. He did not study the paranormal, had no interest in it whatsoever, and in fact, had a very strong interest in making sure that his knowledge of such things remained as minimal as possible. But he forgot to cover the phone, and of course Llorente went right off. *What the hell do you know, Casillas? Did you—did you _know_ this was going to happen? Why didn’t you—*

“Hey, wait a fucking minute, I did—I did _not_. I didn’t know anything and I don’t know anything more than you, and actually, you know more because you’ve actually seen things and I’m just being told about them, okay? For Christ’s sake, what kind of bastard do you think I am?” Iker snapped.

Victor’s brows shot up. He put his hand out again and Iker jerked away, only to realize too late that the other man was reaching for him, not for his phone. A flash of…irritation went over Victor’s face and he flopped back against the counter with a huff. After a second, he pushed himself up a bit and lifted a weary face to Iker. “Didn’t Silva take him back?”

This time Iker remembered to cover the phone. “Why?”

“Well, he probably knows more than either of us, right? So tell Llorente to fuck off and have Silva deal with it, or have him call Raúl or Figo or whoever. The point is, people who actually know this stuff should handle it,” Victor said, tone wavering between lecturing and pleading. He stuck his hand out again and gave Iker’s phone-arm a weird little scratch, like he meant to go for a poke and then got hung up on thinking about how it came off in the middle and maybe forgot he was even touching Iker. “He needs to stop blaming us for this. It’s not like we triggered it this time. Shit happened before we even got there.”

“I don’t—” Then there was a voice in Iker’s ear and it was Xabi, sounding way calmer, and Iker had to settle for just nodding at Victor. “Hey, what happened?”

Xabi also sounded like he was striking one of those poses, all hand on hip and high head and model silhouette. While Iker was more than satisfied with his share of natural gifts, he had to say Xabi sometimes irked him with how…it wasn’t just how great Xabi looked, but also how the man didn’t even look like he meant to do it. *We just cleaned up, and then we went outside to talk since everyone was packed up, and then Fernando went back in because he forgot something. And the whole first floor was covered with this really thick black kind of scum. Silva’s already calling somebody to bring over holy water.*

“Oh. Okay.” Iker searched for something appropriate to say. “So…you’re good?”

If a pause could be exasperated, that one was. *No, we’re still freaked out,* Xabi finally said. *Anyway, so ‘nando and Silva both said that you and Victor had filmed this sort of thing and—*

“No, look, we didn’t film it. We were planning to, but got spooked out before we even took the camera out of the case. And when we did figure it out, it was after having some really awful…it wasn’t fun. And I didn’t make it go away, okay? I wasn’t even there—it was Raúl and his ridiculous news-clipping archives and Hierro’s weird history with Guardiola, and maybe even Figo,” Iker snapped. 

Xabi did the vocal equivalent of patting Iker on the shoulders. *Okay, sorry, for some reason people keep telling me you did. But fine, you didn’t. I…well, we were thinking…*

Iker closed his eyes. Suddenly he felt like going to bed. More specifically, he felt like going to the bedroom, getting on the bed, piling all the blankets and pillows up and then burrowing under them, so that he wouldn’t be able to hear or see anything that was going on outside. That way, he wouldn’t know about them, and they wouldn’t know about him.

He heard a noise and opened his eyes. Victor was looking away from him, across the kitchen, with hands jammed into pockets and one foot scuffing the floor. Then the other man exhaled, dragged-out and rough. He pulled out his hands and ran them over his head, finally knotting them together at the back of his neck as he tugged down on them. “They really need help,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. “Xabi?” Iker finally said.

*This isn’t your problem, I know. Nobody wants to get more people involved.* Xabi mumbled something to himself, irritated. *I—look, I’m just—I’m thinking. I’m trying to figure out—because there has to be an explanation—*

“Xabi, I think the camera’s at Victor’s, and right now we’re in my place,” Iker said. Each and every word felt like a lead weight dropping out of his mouth. And oddly, given that they were coming _out_ of him, he didn’t feel the pressure inside his chest getting any better. “Just…I guess, it’s only inside the house so far, right? Nothing’s happened to any of you outside of it.”

*Nothing’s happened to anybody, except for that idiot who went upstairs and Cesc. It’s always when we go out. Listen, Iker, I honestly don’t want to put you or Victor out if it’s going to make trouble for you,* Xabi told him. Sincerely. Because Xabi really didn’t _want_ to, but they were pretty much past the point of whether or not they wanted to, and they both knew it.

Iker managed a weak smile. “Thanks, Xabi. When and where should we meet you guys?”

It was pushing four in the morning now. Not that late for anybody with a decent social life, but Xabi thought it might be better to just wait till people had calmed down from the latest freak-out and gotten some sleep. It really didn’t seem like anyone was in immediate danger—especially as Silva had somehow managed to locate holy water at an hour that was too early even for monks—so Iker wasn’t about to disagree.

The Basques had had to scatter to about five or six different places to get everybody somewhere to nap, so after some fruitless attempts to agree on a meeting place that was equally distant from everyone, they gave up and just picked the house. Well, the front lawn, where Silva said he was going to dump any holy water he had left after doing all the doors and windows. He also said he was going to bring more of that with him, and maybe some other stuff that Raúl had been hoarding and at that point Iker decided he was going to bed.

About two minutes later Victor came and sat on the left side. He moved around a little and did some things on the floor, probably taking off his shoes, and then awkwardly laid down next to Iker.

“You don’t have to go,” Iker said.

Victor snorted. The arm he had between them moved a little. “You didn’t have to offer.”

“Well, look, I’d be kind of an asshole if I didn’t.” Iker exhaled before he’d quite finished the last word, then decided he was just too tired and really didn’t give a shit if Victor went off on a temper tantrum. They were in his place so he wouldn’t be the one who’d have to leave. “I—we’ll get a camera from the university.”

“You’re not going to get one. None of them are going to be free,” Victor pointed out. “Also, you said ‘we’—”

“Because I wasn’t thinking and it doesn’t mean you have to go, okay? You can just—”

Victor hit him. Then made a low, irritated, weary noise, his hand coming back to flick hesitantly at Iker’s hip. He cleared his throat, paused, and then turned his head so that his breath peppered Iker’s shoulder. “Iker, you are an asshole sometimes, but this one doesn’t count.”

A sharp retort came to Iker’s tongue, twisted there eagerly and then suddenly, unexpectedly withered. He laughed instead, and closed his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t the only one of them who was getting good at recognizing the warning signs. “I kind of think your idea about telling them to fuck off was better.”

“I like Xabi,” was Victor’s response, delivered as little more than a murmur. His chin nudged at Iker’s shoulder; Iker shifted a little but kept looking at the ceiling. Then he turned over on his side, his hand grazing into Iker’s thigh again. “Stop thinking about it. Just go to sleep and…and we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

“Mostly just to make sure we don’t break your camera, right?” Iker said. He felt the bed shift under Victor’s exasperated wriggle and had to grin. Just a little. It was all a bunch of snowballing bullshit again, but…it was nice not to be doing it alone. And by ‘alone,’ he included all the times he’d actually had other people around, because they all somehow felt the need to stand there and criticize and ‘keep tabs on him’ and generally act like they knew more than him when they knew at most the same amount.

“No, you asshole. Because if I’m going to start coming over here, it’d better be so I’m seeing you. Don’t want to see Ramos.” Something bony dug into Iker’s shoulder, then retreated. Then Victor prodded Iker’s arm with his chin. “Besides, I’ll be holding _my_ camera, so there’s no problem with you breaking it.”

Iker grinned again. He pushed himself up on his arms, then put out his hand when he felt Victor starting to rise. The other man stared at him, confused and defensive, and—and then so relieved when Iker just swung his arm up and back to tuck it under Victor’s head. Just plain, uncomplicated relief, no sense that Iker was being a shit for doing any misleading or anything else there, and sometimes Iker did wonder what the hell had happened to the other man to make him think it was natural for people to leave him. Victor always said he had a great family, and Iniesta at least was a nice guy, but still. It was hard to believe anybody could just be wired to be that insecure.

At any rate, Iker was _not_ that much of an asshole, as Victor had just said himself. He got himself settled back down, let Victor get that chin of his placed so it wasn’t gouging out Iker’s flesh, and then went back to staring at the ceiling.

“It’s not coming here,” Victor said after a few minutes, very quietly. “We’re going there. In the morning. It’s…that’s different.”

“I know.” Iker tilted his head a little, till the tips of Victor’s hair touched his mouth. Then he turned it back. He blinked a few times, the last time hard enough to make his eyes burn for a second, and then told himself to stop being a moron. Maybe if he did that enough, he’d start believing that that was actually the problem.

He fell asleep before he figured out whether he was right.

* * *

Like Iker had told them earlier, one camera was not going to cover the whole house. It wasn’t even going to cover one room very well. “But then the bookshelf blocks half the door.”

“We have the camera in the hall covering that whole area, so I don’t see what the big deal is,” Cesc said. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Iker like he wasn’t a public relations major whose sense of space only extended to figuring out how many people the fire code allowed into a room.

“Because we had to put that camera so that it could cover the front door and we couldn’t attach it to the ceiling fan without tearing that out. So now the angles don’t match and we’ve got a blind spot the size of a two-man wall.” Iker reminded himself to keep it simple and short, and to not just whack the other man on the head. “We should put this one on the bookshelf.”

“But then we can’t have it on the remote-control stand. We might have a smaller blind spot, but we’re going to sacrifice mobility,” Victor said. He almost ducked his head when Iker looked at him. Almost. Instead he settled for awkwardly scratching the back of his neck. “I’m just—”

Iker sighed. “Yeah, I know. Well…maybe we can move the bookshelf?”

They looked at it. The thing was as tall as Llorente and, unlike the usual cheap flat-pack furniture in student apartments, appeared to be made out of actual wood. As in, the grain was real, and it probably weighed a ton, and would crush somebody’s foot if they dropped it.

“I guess we should have Victor run everything by you, if you’re going to be like that,” Cesc muttered.

Victor spun on Cesc first, and snappy enough to make Cesc’s eyes widen. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Nothing! Nothing, I just…um, Iker?” Cesc peeked around Victor. 

“So first you’re calling me bitchy, and now you’re asking me to save you because Victor’s bitchy.” Iker put his finger to his mouth for a moment, then shook his head. “Nope. Not saving you.”

“Iker! You like me!”

For another moment Victor stood poised to lunge at terrified, backpeddling Cesc. Then he snorted and slung himself around to look at Iker. “Do you?”

“I’m thinking about that one too,” Iker drawled, while Cesc looked increasingly forlorn. Then he jumped as somebody kicked him in the back of the foot. “What the…Xavi. Xavi, you—okay, who told you, why the hell would you come after that, and…and we got all the ones left. Where the hell did that come from?”

Xavi put down the camera bag before he answered. He didn’t take half the credit that was due to him for…pretty much everything that he did, but that didn’t mean that Xavi didn’t know how to be smug. “About three different people, because I’m friends with way too many people here and somebody’s got to make sure you don’t kill each other before the poltergeist gets you, and I just did. So we don’t have a blind spot on the first floor now.”

Iker opened his mouth to point out that actually, they had one more room to worry about down here, and then he spotted the Iniesta wondering if he really had to come into the room. He started to greet the man, only to get elbowed as Victor pushed past him.

“What are you doing here? Didn’t they tell you it’s a ghost again?” Victor said sharply.

Normally that kind of tone would’ve made Iker assume Victor was on the verge of another temper fit, but Iniesta didn’t even blink. “I was worried.”

Victor’s shoulders hitched up, held there, and then slowly dropped. He put one hand back to scratch at the back of his neck. “It’s…probably not a big deal, you know.”

“Shut it,” Xavi said to Cesc.

Cesc shut his mouth and looked wounded. Then he looked annoyed as Iker dumped a bunch of cables in his arms. “This was your idea,” Iker told him. “You should be thrilled we’re letting you help execute it.”

Before Cesc could respond, something grabbed Iker’s elbow and hauled him into the next room. Then Xavi let the blood rush back into Iker’s arm and dusted his hands off on his hips. He glanced back from where they’d come, then looked up at Iker. “So?”

“So I kind of think something’s going on, and I don’t really want to be here, but I’m trying to do the right thing. Okay?” Iker dropped back against the wall and spread his hands. Then he sighed and rubbed at his face. He hadn’t slept too well last night—he didn’t remember any of his dreams, but he remembered that they hadn’t been relaxing. And Victor had kept shifting around suddenly, so Iker had half-woken a dozen times to remove various limbs from the more sensitive parts of his anatomy. Which maybe said something about Victor’s dreams, but Iker wasn’t going there. “Silva talked somebody into giving him holy water and they already sprinkled it around, so we’re not exactly walking in unprepared. Um, and we’re going to try to film it too. I hope to God this thing doesn’t break any of them, because…”

“Didn’t really sleep, huh,” Xavi said.

Iker looked at him.

Xavi shrugged and pulled out his phone, only to look over as somebody clumsily came down the steps. “So who else is around? Silva still here?”

“I think he’s napping in a basket somewhere. He was up all night splashing the holy water around, I’ll give him that,” Iker said.

“Basket?”

“Well, because he’s…” Iker started to gesture to show the size, only to catch Xavi’s eyebrow twitching in warning “…and evil, and…I’m tired. And not an English major. I film things, I don’t write the script.”

The little nod Xavi gave him both thanked Iker for sparing civilization that and indicated that they should move onto the next topic. “Llorente let me in and I saw Alonso. So it’s them, Silva, you, me, the guys in the other room…”

“I think that’s it. We wanted to keep it down to the people who’d actually seen something weird, so we wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time telling people Victor and me and Silva aren’t crazy,” Iker explained. He thought he knew where Xavi was going with this and dug the floor-plan sketch they’d made out of his jeans-pocket, then spread it out so Xavi could see. “And that’s just about enough to cover the second floor, since we don’t have the cameras.”

“Well, only if it’s one person to a room, and isn’t that a bad idea?” After a moment, Xavi cleared his throat. “Since…”

Iker looked at the floor plans. They’d wasted two cups of coffee just arguing about whether they should have people inside at all: Cesc had actually wanted a person in every room, whereas Victor had tried till he’d been practically banging his head into the wall to figure out how to cover a two-story building with five cameras. And then that little shit Silva had had to go and comment about how he was surprised Victor would leave his camera alone, and that had ended that argument.

“I mean, I know you want to help, but also, I don’t think you wanna get dragged through a fucking window again,” Xavi added.

“Everybody always acts like that’s the only thing that happened,” Iker muttered, only half-hearted in his sarcasm. He rolled his shoulders, then his head. “I mean, Victor got clawed up. Doesn’t anybody want to give him credit for suffering?”

Xavi snorted at him. “So how’d he hold up after the first night at your place?” He tried to hide his smug grin, failed, and just let it spread over his face. “Well, I wanted to know why the hell you’d skipped out on our study session this morning, so I bugged Ramos, and if he was going to tell me that, he might as well tell me that you finally got Victor to come over.”

“He looks okay,” Iker finally said. Sometimes Xavi honestly _abused_ his status as one of Iker’s oldest friends. Abused it and enjoyed the hell out of it. “Victor, I mean. Sergio, we’ll see after I get through explaining to him again how not to be a fucking gossip.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Silva came tripping down the staircase, just fast enough for Iker to see that he was actually talking to the phone glued to his ear, and not to Iker. He paused when he saw Xavi, then ambled over to them while making various exasperated noises at the phone. “No. No, we’re…Guaje. Okay, look, I know you’re pissed off because they called you in on your off-day…I thought you and Mori fixed it. Wasn’t that what you were doing before they called—okay. Okay. _Okay._ Okay, listen, Iker’s being a jerk and I need to tell him to shut up bye.”

Then he shut his phone and shoved it in his pocket. He ran one hand through his hair, blowing out his cheeks, and looked up at Iker like he hadn’t just. Just. “Hey, so we set up yet?”

“You are pure evil,” Iker said.

“Yeah, it’s Saturday.” Silva shrugged. “We picking rooms yet? Because I call Victor.”

“What? What are you…wait, we don’t have enough if we’re pairing up and also, you’re not getting anywhere near him. He’s a nice Catalan kid under all that leather coat motorcycle crap, unlike you,” Iker said. He put the floor plans away before Silva could get at them. “Anyway, Xavi just pointed out that that’s stupid. That’s asking for one of us to get attacked.”

“Okay, but if you and Victor get together, you’re going to end up messing up somebody’s bed again,” Silva said, shrugging. He looked up at Iker, absently ruffling his hair so it fell more into his eyes and hid the demonic gleam in them. “I guess I was okay with it because all that pretending that you two weren’t into each other was getting on my nerves, but I don’t know how Xabi and Fernando are going to be about it.”

For a moment Iker just stared at the other man. Because he didn’t understand. He truly didn’t. He wasn’t a perfect human being by any measure, but he loved his family and friends and tried to do right by them, and tried to have good goals in life, like doing something that he loved while making sure he wasn’t going to starve for it. And still, somehow, he ended up with the most fucked-up circle of acquaintances outside of a mental hospital.

“Okay, now you’re just being an asshole,” Xavi sighed. When Silva threw him a shocked look, he rolled his eyes and pushed Silva by the arm back into the other room. All right, Iker did have some sane, compassionate friends. “Don’t even, man. Iker’s better at that one and I’ve got years of immunity built up to him. Hey, now that everybody’s here, we should probably talk about a plan, right?”

Or maybe not so much. Victor and Cesc had migrated to the doorway while Iker hadn’t been looking, and were leaning on opposite sides of it with frighteningly similar expressions of smug amusement. When the protesting Silva got near enough, Cesc remembered he was actually Iker’s friend and slung an arm over Silva’s shoulder to keep him on that side of the room. Nice and far away from Iker, who was happy to ignore the little shit in favor of giving Victor the once-over.

“Enjoyed that?” he said.

“Kind of—well, yeah.” Victor gave Iker’s shoulder a fake-condescending pat. “I’m sorry, but you look hilarious when Silva gets up into your face. He’s half your size.”

“I know, but I can’t touch him because that little son of a whore’s gotten into certain people’s good graces, and he knows it.” Iker draped his arm over Victor’s shoulders, made the man squirm by blowing into his ear—for once, he earned the usual jab in the ribs—and looked over Victor’s head at the rest of the room. Xabi was over by the window, talking into his phone, while Llorente was listening in, though with half an eye on…Silva. Who should watch it, since Raúl could be a little weird about his ideas of fairness and might just let the Basques get him if Silva genuinely ticked them off. “Jerk was calling dibs on you, like I’d let him do that.”

Llorente looked up. “Dibs?”

“Iker filled me in, and we’ve got enough cameras to cover this floor, but not the second floor,” Xavi said. He dropped himself onto the couch, dusted off his knees and then looked around at them all. “Do we need to? I’m not that thrilled about just going up there and watching, even if we do it in pairs. I mean, there’s also all sorts of reasons why cameras are more reliable than human observers.”

Xabi and Llorente glanced at each other. Then Xabi put his phone away and stepped around Llorente so he could perch on the sofa arm. “Well, if the point is to prove that no person could possibly have done this…”

“Then we search the whole place in one group, make sure nobody’s in here but us, and stay down here with the cameras. No, sorry, and somebody goes outside to watch that nobody’s climbing up the side of the house. But anyway, no need to go up there ourselves,” Xavi said, reasonably enough.

“But what if something happens upstairs? Landlord’s a hardass, it doesn’t matter whether we’ve documented that nobody else could have gotten in. He’ll have to see it on video, and even then, I’m not too sure that he wouldn’t just ignore it,” Llorente retorted, turning towards them. The bags under his eyes were starting to swallow his cheeks and he kept putting up his hand to rub at them. “I just…look, we’re going to do this, we’re going to cover everything, with everything we’ve got. I just don’t see how it’s worth the trouble otherwise.”

Xavi started to argue, then stopped himself. Not too smoothly, and anyway, stopping himself wasn’t really like him. Then he flicked a concerned look at Iker and Iker got it.

“Okay, so we’ll go up in pairs,” Iker said. He undraped his arm from Victor’s shoulders, giving the man’s stiffening back a quick pat on the way down. He also paused for a few seconds, but Victor didn’t say anything. “But first we search the place, like Xavi says. We lock all the doors and windows so no morons can come in, and when we go up, we prop the doors open and make sure each pair can see at least one more pair. And we have our phones on, and not just for Twittering, _Cesc_.”

“Oh _myGod_ , I am so _not_ the only—”

“I called Guaje earlier, but I’ll give him another call so somebody knows to come check on us in a couple hours,” Silva added. At Iker’s and Xavi’s looks, he let out a shoulder-dropping sigh of resignation. “No, trying to be helpful, honestly. Not my fault he’s gonna be the only one home today. You know, unless Iker wants to get a professor on call or something.”

Victor glowered at Silva. “You were okay till the last bit.”

“You’re all…really serious about this,” Llorente said over Silva’s muttering about whips and entitled Madrileños. He blinked a few times, then squeezed his eyes shut and held it for a moment. Then he opened them and went on staring. “I’m…”

“We’re very grateful,” Xabi stated firmly, while stepping on Llorente’s foot. Somehow he managed that and stepping forward and didn’t have even a suggestion of an awkward hitch in his gait. He was just…not inducing jealousy in Iker, damn it. “Grateful, and also, that all sounds like a decent plan. So who’s going with who?”

* * *

Victor didn’t go with Silva. Or Cesc, who was still looking put-upon whenever he could catch somebody’s eye but who Iker didn’t trust to _not_ end up cratering the place just because he really, really, _really_ needed to know what side of the bed Iker slept on. Xabi apparently had the same opinion, since he volunteered to go with Silva and suggested in the calmest threatening tone that Iker had ever heard that Llorente should take Cesc. Llorente was clearly less than excited by the idea, but whatever Xabi had on him must have been epic, because he even shot down Cesc’s lame excuse that he wanted to “catch” Xavi up on last night when Xavi already knew about last night’s sleeping arrangements.

And speaking of which, Xavi was displaying an unexpected and rather disturbing interest in Iker’s sleeping habits, because he snagged Victor while stepping on Iker’s foot to turn Iker’s objection into a pained grunt. “’s okay, we’re good,” he explained.

“What?” was about all Iker could manage.

Xavi ignored him and hooked an arm around Victor’s waist, and while Victor wasted time looking confused, dragged them towards the stairs. Iker finally snapped himself out of it and took a step forward, only to find the space occupied.

He stepped back and Iniesta looked nervously up at him. “So…we’re going together?” Iniesta said.

Iker opened his mouth, then grimaced and glanced at the staircase. Xavi and Victor were already gone, and as Iker looked around, everyone else was starting to move as well. Llorente was already listing all the things that Cesc needed to shut up about or else various Basques were going to show solidarity with the Catalan cause by forcibly merging him with his native land. And right, Iniesta was staring at him, because they were ghost-hunting and all that. Dangling his best friend upside-down till Xavi told him why he was suddenly switching personalities with Silva would have to wait.

“Yep.” Iker took one last look around, then sighed and just picked up his backpack. He checked that he’d remembered to stick his water bottle and laptop in there, then headed for the stairs. “Let’s go set up.”

Iniesta didn’t say anything and just fell quietly in behind Iker. They had a corner bedroom that opened right across from the staircase, and if they stayed just beside the door, they could see Silva in one of the other bedrooms and Llorente rolling his eyes in the doorway of the bathroom. Xavi and Victor should have been in the bedroom next to them, but the way the wall was angled meant Iker couldn’t see into that room unless he stepped out into the hall.

“Do you want this one?”

“What?” Iker said, starting.

When he turned around, he found Iniesta offering him a beanbag chair. He must have had an odd expression on his face because Iniesta winced and poked the beanbag away with his foot. The other man looked around, then gestured at a desk chair on the other side of the room. “Or that?”

“Um, yeah, I’ll…I’ll get it.” Iker got out his laptop and set it aside, then went to drag the chair over. He moved it next to the door, then put his laptop on top of the seat and got down on his knees before it. Once he’d taken the laptop out of sleep, he went about booting up the remote feed. “You can have the beanbag.”

Iniesta murmured something noncommittal and just plopped himself on the floor. He folded himself up against the door and then Iker sort of forgot he was there trying to get the damn feed software to work. The connection clearly was working because he was getting images, but the colors were all off like he’d turned off the red and the yellow channels. Granted, the last time he’d used the program, he’d been fooling around with colorization for a cinematography project, but this just looked…weird. He distinctly remembered doing a very classy abstract short.

That’d been two semesters ago too, so it took him a while to remember which parameters he needed to change and where he could find them. It didn’t help that the wireless in the place was pretty sluggish and if he didn’t want the feed to freeze up, he had to count to ten in between clicking boxes. At any rate, he finally got the damn thing showing the living room downstairs in a way that actually matched what it’d looked like when he had been standing in it, and by that point he was pretty damn ready to go home.

“Is it okay?”

Iker jumped, knocked his elbow into the corner of his laptop and had to grab for it to keep it from sliding off the chair. “Jesus,” he muttered. He steadied it and then sat back, rubbing at his arm. “You can really creep up on people.”

“Sorry.” Iniesta looked so embarrassed that Iker might as well have kicked a puppy and had some bystander post video of it to youtube, with the kind of guilty feelings it inspired. “I just didn’t want to distract you. It seemed pretty complicated.”

“No, it’s not. It’s just…a pain in the ass.” The feed still looked fine, so Iker twisted himself around so he could see the computer screen and the hallway. “Anyway, it’s good now. You can see for yourself.”

Iniesta darted a look at the computer, then nodded a tentative smile at Iker. Then he went back to hunching up against the door. Someone in one of the other rooms bumped into something and swore, and Iniesta jerked his head up, his eyes wide. He kept looking around even after Iker had told him it wasn’t anything.

“You don’t have to do this,” Iker said after a moment. He shifted off the leg that was going numb, then adjusted the laptop so that his neck wasn’t so cricked. “Seriously, if you’re freaked out, it’s…that’s what sane people should be doing.”

“Victor said it hasn’t been as bad as the other time with you two,” Iniesta replied. His shoulders were still tensed up, but he wasn’t looking so much like he was going to pop out of his skin. He glanced at Iker, then twisted to stare at the laptop. “Was that really that bad?”

Iker grimaced before he could help himself.

“I mean, not that I’m saying—because Victor told me, and I believe him, and—”

“Yeah, no, it’s just that…I don’t like thinking about it. Which I guess tells you what you wanted to know, since it’s been a couple months,” Iker muttered. The downstairs feed still wasn’t showing anything interesting, and they’d been sitting here for—he checked the laptop clock—twenty minutes. And he’d thought time was supposed to fly when you were stressed out. “It was…I guess because we just didn’t know what the hell was going on, and things kept happening, and we never really got too much time to think. Not that I went and researched this kind of crap afterwards, but I think I know a bit more now. And also, this one doesn’t seem too violent.”

Iniesta nodded along as Iker talked, watching him with a solemn expression. He looked like he was actually reassured by Iker’s rambling, which made Iker feel a little better. It was a shitty situation, but Iker was trying to make the best of it, and he was being a bit more constructive about it than certain other people who thought danger was a great time to go prying into personal lives. “Victor did a lot of research,” Iniesta said.

“I mean, it’s just been messing with people, not really going after…” Then Iker heard what Iniesta had actually said, which wasn’t the nice, bland acknowledgement that Iker was saying useful things. He blinked. “He did?”

“Yeah. He told me, if something like this ever happened again, he didn’t want to be unprepared.” The way Iniesta was looking at him was the same way as before, a little uncertain, looking for cues from Iker, and totally not in line with where the conversation was going. Because Iniesta might be stammering and not meeting Iker’s eyes, but he definitely had an agenda and somehow Iker had the sense that getting in the way of that agenda was going to be more dangerous than dealing with any ghost. “It really freaked him out.”

Yes, Iker had noticed, Iker thought and just managed not to say. Fine, not to the point where he’d caught Victor watching hours and hours of _Cuarto Milenio_ and checking out paranormal activity websites like the man had apparently been doing, but he was well aware that it hadn’t been Victor’s favorite experience. Hadn’t been his either, not that most people bothered asking _him_. “I told him he didn’t have to come either. He got all defensive.”

“I know.” For a moment Iniesta’s face was fleetingly arranged into something very close to exasperated. It was like seeing a pink unicorn and yes, Iker’s face did hurt when Iniesta suddenly looked at him and he had to switch his expression to not-gaping in about a nanosecond. “Honestly, he’s got this idea that you feel like you’ve got to fix this and you don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re going to keep trying till you take care of it. Which is a good thing but he thinks you’re going to work so hard at fixing it that you’re not going to notice if things start to go wrong.”

Iker blinked again. He shifted, then tried to lean back against something, but just got the sharp corner of the chair in his shoulderblade. Stifling a couple choice words, he pulled himself forward and stuck a hand back there to rub at the spot. Across the way nothing seemed to be going on, aside from Silva showing an unseen Xabi something on his phone. Which actually could involve anything from people Iker didn’t know and didn’t care about to a vast blackmailing conspiracy over his baby photos, so…he was getting off-track. “I _told_ him I wasn’t going to—I mean, I didn’t exactly know I was going to get dragged across campus till it happened, and we don’t really know…look, I’m not stupid. Nice of Victor to worry and all, but I’m no martyr.”

“Okay,” Iniesta said, tucking his chin down. He seemed more than a little embarrassed to have even brought it up.

“Anyway, I don’t really see how him going into survival mode over this is going to help. Nobody ever warns us that this shit is coming,” Iker muttered. He checked the downstairs feed again. Still nothing. “He better have not told anyone else he was looking into this kind of thing. Bad enough that somebody told Figo and now the man’s always asking if I want to come on one of his investigations with him. I like him, but I don’t want to be him and sometimes I honestly think he must’ve gotten whacked on the head, or maybe possessed by a…perverted—”

“Well, he was worried about you.” Iniesta looked up at Iker like that was really the whole explanation, instead of, say, another mystery wrapped inside an enigma wrapped in a however the hell that one went. Then he ducked his head again and began to pick at his nails. “He does, you know. He was, um, kind of surprised you still seem into him, and also, you don’t try to fix him, and…”

Iker put his shoulderblade back into the seat corner. He grimaced but didn’t really pay attention to that, except to move left so that it was at least the whole edge digging into him. “No, I do. I mean, okay, I’m not a psychologist and I’m not such an asshole that I’m going to mess with that shit when I don’t know what I’m doing. I know I don’t know. But I’m also—not an asshole. So look, I _try_ , when he’s upset, to—”

“No, that’s what I meant,” Iniesta said. When Iker looked at him again, he was patently nervous about cutting Iker off. But at the same time, he was going to get out what was on his mind and he would cut off Iker as many times as he had to. Picking his nails and bobbing his head all the way, but he would. “A lot of people, they just think he’s fucked-up and he needs to not be fucked-up, he needs to be normal. He says you just act like he’s upset and you want to know why. It’s different.”

“Oh. I…well.” Yeah, it was, Iker supposed. He wasn’t sure why it was a topic of conversation, though. “Okay. Glad he’s cool with that.”

Iniesta laughed a little. Very quietly, still a bit twitchy, but he was looking at Iker the way Xavi did whenever Xavi was thinking Iker was his best friend the village idiot. “I used to really worry that he’d never even let somebody do that. He’s really not used to it.”

“He needs to get used to it. He can act like a dick all he wants but I’ve seen scarier things at this point,” Iker muttered.

“He’s trying. He just…he gets worried about how long it takes too,” Iniesta replied. One of his feet slid out a few centimeters and he pulled it back like he’d nearly stuck it in the fire. “You know he’s trying, right?”

“Yeah.” Iker glanced idly into the hall, then at the computer. Was he supposed to say something else? “I’m human, okay? I get annoyed sometimes with him, but that doesn’t mean—look, if I’m gonna leave, he’d know. But I don’t plan to.”

“Anything?” Iniesta nodded at the laptop, so Iker turned it so the other man could see. “I hope you’re annoyed with him. That way he’ll figure out that it’s not the end of the world when that happens. But just don’t be a jerk.” He looked up at Iker. “Because I’m not—I’m not too intimidating, I know, but I’m his friend, and I’ll do research and think about it and figure out how to get you if you hurt him.”

With all the times Iker had been threatened in his life, he shouldn’t have been thrown, but he was…staring at Iniesta, who was looking solemnly back, and he believed the man. Iniesta wouldn’t do anything like try to call up psychopathic spirits to get Iker, but he would sit there and make it a project and whatever he came up with, it would really, really make Iker regret it. It was…normal. But a normal that Iker would actually spend time worrying about, because it was completely plausible and he had no excuse to not think it could happen.

“I think Xavi’s saying the same thing to Victor right now,” Iniesta added. “Because um, we both think you’re good for each other, but Victor can be a moron, and Xavi says the same thing about you. So just so you know, it’s not just you two who’ll be, um, making sure you aren’t acting like morons.”

Next time something came up, maybe Iker should just crowdsource it on Twitter or Facebook. Because it wasn’t like it’d actually change the way his life was run right now.

“Oh, my God!”

Iker was on his feet before he remembered the laptop. He looked down at the clatter—Iniesta just about saved it from smashing on the floor—then stuck his head out of the door. “Fernando?”

“What the hell is that?” Llorente snapped.

“Llorente? What happened?” Victor peered out of the bedroom opposite Iker. He caught Iker’s eye and took a step out of the room, towards Iker. Then he changed his mind and moved back, lifting his arm to grab the top of the doorway so that Xavi could look past him. “Cesc? Are you all right?”

Something was moving around in the bathroom. Their shadows were showing against the half-open door, and then when Iker craned his head, he thought he got a glimpse of Llorente’s curls. He heard Llorente muttering to himself, so it couldn’t be too bad, but it was a little strange for Cesc to be so quiet. “Cesc?”

“Did you see that?” Cesc finally came to the bathroom door. He was moving a bit unsteadily, like someone had given him a harder than usual smack to the head. “That—that thing?”

“Something just went up…” Llorente’s arm came out behind Cesc, made a flourishing gesture and then disappeared before Iker could point out that Cesc’s head had been in the way. “What the hell was that?”

“Iker?” Iniesta said, prodding Iker’s elbow.

Cesc was rubbing his hands over and over his face, hard enough to make his skin start to redden. He really looked shaken up and…and Llorente seemed too busy examining the ceiling to notice, so Iker started to go over, only to have Iniesta grab his arm. He raised that to shake off the other man, only to get distracted when Cesc suddenly looked up at him. “What’d it look like?” he asked. “Like a person?”

“No. No, it was this…like this white thing. I thought it was a moth or something, and I went to wave it off the light and it dove straight _at_ me,” Cesc said. He lifted one hand and pushed at his shoulder, still looking dazed. “Then it went up through the ceiling. _Through it_.”

“Did it hit you?” Xavi asked.

Cesc shook his head. Then he grimaced and put one hand up to his temple like he’d just gotten a headache. He glanced over his shoulder at Llorente, who had his hands up feeling the ceiling. “I don’t think so, but it was—it wasn’t a moth, anyway. And—”

They all jumped at the bang. Llorente snatched his hands down as if he’d been burned.

“I don’t know, but I just…kind of think it’s doing things up there,” Cesc finished, staring up at the attic. Which now sounded as if someone was walking around while wearing really heavy boots.

“Iker!”

“What?” Iker snapped, turning. He felt guilty before he even saw Iniesta’s flinching face, but seriously, how fucking important could it be with creepy stomping footsteps upstairs?

“Iker, I think you should look at this,” Iniesta said, holding up the laptop. His voice cracked a little bit but his eyes had locked onto Iker and they made sure that the next place Iker looked was that computer screen.

At first Iker didn’t get it. The view was the same living room as before, nothing out of place, not even a weird smudge to be seen—it must have showed on his face, because Iniesta winced and reached around the screen. The other man fumbled with the keys and the image suddenly froze, then rewound several minutes. Then it began to play again and Iker saw why Iniesta had been so insistent.

“What’s going on?” somebody called at them. Maybe Silva.

“You see it, right?” Iniesta whispered. 

“It looks like a…like a…” Iker squinted at the screen “…and then it went up…here?”

Cesc glommed onto Iker’s arm, and then looked shocked when Iker reflexively tried to slam him into the wall. Being the annoyance he was, he twisted so he missed the wall and hung on stubbornly. “What did? The thing that dove at me?”

“I…” Did not see what dove at you, Iker was about to say, when he remembered something. He looked up and saw Iniesta in front of him. Looked over and saw Xavi and Victor together, and then Silva and Alonso were over there. And Cesc was dangling off his arm, so…he turned around and Llorente was standing in the bathroom doorway by himself. “Fernan—”

All the lights shorted out.

* * *

Thankfully, whatever had blown the fuses hadn’t also melted Iker’s laptop. They took it off the power cord and gathered around its glowing screen in the middle of the hall while they debated what to do next. It’d been a couple minutes and nothing else crazy had happened, and it was daytime so it wasn’t too dark in the house. 

“Yeah, but we’re still in the dark and we don’t know why, and this is so fucking creepy,” Cesc muttered.

“We noticed that. A while ago,” Victor muttered right back. He rolled his eyes at Cesc’s glower, then went back to quizzing Iniesta on every body part to make sure that the other man was okay.

Iker…was not even getting into that, because he was already way too fed up with way too many things, and he just couldn’t handle them all. He was goddamn human and he wanted to go home and, if he was really honest with himself, a tiny part of him wanted so badly to get out of this that it wanted to pretend that he’d never even met any of these people. But—no. Okay. He was dealing with that first, because it was easy and straightforward and he was not running out on his friends.

Great. Next up…he had to admit to a twinge of satisfaction at the looks on Xabi’s and Llorente’s faces. At least neither of them were going to be bullshitting about not believing this was happening in front of them anymore. “Didn’t anybody bring a flashlight?” Iker asked. “I know we packed some.”

_Click_. For a moment, Victor’s disembodied head peered at them, all bright cheekbones and nose-tip and forehead. Then he shoved down on Silva’s arm so that the man’s flashlight was pointed at the floor. “Get that off me, do you want to blind—and why do we need a flashlight?” He looked up at Iker, ignoring Silva’s muttering about not his fault that the world had height differences. “It’s not that dark.”

“I know, but…well, we’re gonna have to go, aren’t we?” Iker waited a few seconds, then sighed and nodded at the ceiling. “Up there. It’s pretty obvious at this point. That thing Cesc and Fernando saw went up there, and the thing I saw—”

“Which you haven’t even told us about yet,” Cesc piped in.

“—which was ripping up the wallpaper downstairs, and which was moving way too quick for me to tell anything except that it was kind of white and it went _up_. See?” Then Iker paused so he could hit ‘replay’ on the laptop. He got elbows on all sides as everybody crowded in, but no more stupid comments. “Okay. So whatever it is—”

“Jesus, well, there’s another trip to the hardware store,” Fernando groaned.

Iker cleared his throat. “Look, do we want to waste time or do we want to really get rid of this thing? It went upstairs, this whole thing started when some idiot went up there, so obviously, we’ve got to go up there.”

“Do we really?” Xavi reached across and pulled down the laptop so that he could see Iker over it. “Okay, so nobody’s gotten _hurt_ , but this thing does destroy property. Maybe we should not get too close?”

“Then how are we going to get rid of it?” Iker snapped. “Stand outside and hold hands and chant?”

“Ahem.” Then, just as Iker was about to explain that he also thought the thing _wanted_ them to go up and maybe they should do what it wanted since it clearly was capable of hurting them, Silva stomped down on his foot. And flashed the flashlight in his face when he doubled over, trying to both grab his foot and whack the little shit at the same time. “Okay, as the one person here who’s been part of an exorcism, they do actually work, so don’t be such a jerk about them. That said, I think you’re right.”

Iker shut his mouth on his initial thoughts about Silva and stared up at the other man. Silva appeared to be serious. He was looking right at Iker, looking like he knew what he was saying and doing as opposed to being completely unaware of his machinations, and in fact, looking like he wished he was saying something else.

“I mean, these things usually have a source, like a room or a piece of furniture or whatever, and we can’t really exorcise it or do anything else unless we go there,” Silva added. “Otherwise it’s just going to run off and hide, and come out again when we’re not looking.”

“Did those people who ran out ever say where they went?” Victor asked abruptly. He had to take a poke from Iniesta before he sort of got that they were all looking at him in confusion, not derision. “The ones who went in the attic in the first place. Did they—I don’t know, break open a box or something…I mean, haven’t you been up there before?”

Llorente started to answer, only to have Xabi stop him. And then stop, period: the man stood there and looked thoughtful, and thoughtful, and Iker briefly wondered whether he was the only one who had ever wanted to poke him when he was like that. He grimaced, embarrassed at himself, and looked away—in time to catch Cesc guiltily stuff his hand in his pocket and away from Xabi. At least Iker wasn’t _that_ obvious.

“We have. We’ve even moved things around. But it’s not like we go up there much. It’s not really big enough for anything but storage, and it’s already full with stuff that was here when we moved in.” Xabi rubbed at his chin. “I don’t remember the landlord telling us not to touch anything.”

“You put anything new in there?” Victor prodded.

More chin-rubbing. “I don’t…”

“What about that locker Javi got off eBay?” Llorente said. “You know, that one that was supposed to have a surprise inside, but was totally empty?”

“Oh. Right.” Xabi grimaced, then shook his head and sighed. He put his hand to his forehead, muttered something about drunken online shopping, and then looked up at them. “Well, I suppose we should go look at that.”

* * *

“They’re complete idiots.” Victor stuck his head almost entirely into his backpack, as if that was going to help his rummaging. His head was probably taking up more room than anything else and it’d be a miracle if he didn’t accidentally stick himself in the eye. “Who—I mean, who does that? Why would you buy something when you don’t know what’s in it? And if you did—why would you keep it? Let alone open it?”

Well, if Xavi ever told the other man about Iker’s childhood Panini sticker collection…or the couple times Iker had tried to satisfy late-night munchies with panic buys at the local grocery…it wasn’t _that_ easy to tell the difference between nectarines and apples, Iker thought mulishly. Then he gave himself a good shake and crouched down beside Victor, and went back to spritzing their flashlights with holy water. “They’re this close to being kicked out, you know. I think they get that it was a bad idea.”

“…dragging everybody else into it…” Then Victor yanked his head out of his bag. He sat back on his heels, looking irritably down into the backpack. One hand went up to rumple at his hair. “Goddamn it.”

“What are you looking for, anyway?” Iker moved the flashlights so that they could dry and then pulled over the bag of candles Silva had handed him. They were plain white ones, about as thick as his wrist and non-tapered. He took out one and sniffed it: nothing but wax.

Victor shrugged. He put his hand in his bag, then took it out and finally looked over at Iker. His brows twitched as he took in the candles. “Blessed?”

“Silva says so. You know, between the liters of holy water and these, I’m starting to wonder if he breaks into churches in his free time,” Iker muttered. He stuck the candle back in the bag and then knelt up so that he could dig into his jeans-pocket and make sure he had a lighter in there. 

Once he had the lighter out, he stared at it for a couple seconds. It wasn’t that interesting, obviously, and when he realized what he was doing, he tossed the lighter onto a nearby table with a disgusted snort. Someone else made a surprised noise and he started, briefly forgetting about Victor. Then he gave himself another shake and just grabbed a flashlight. Silva was the so-called expert on exorcisms, so he could handle the candles. He had all that damned water too so he’d be prepared in case they managed to set things on fire on top of everything else.

“Do you want to go home?” Victor asked. He was watching Iker like he thought Iker would—would do some damage or something. Put a fist through the wall.

It wasn’t like Villa was around, Iker almost pointed out. Instead he just snorted and looked away.

“Since we’re all sure it’s in the attic, we don’t need that many people to cover. You could…”

“What happened to telling them to fuck off?” Iker said, turning back. He sounded more pissed off than he should have been, than he meant to, and yeah, he did remember Iniesta about half an hour ago. He didn’t get it; he wasn’t even that irritated at this point. It was hard to be, what with how ridiculous it was getting. “I…do kind of want to kill Javi. You’re right about that.”

Victor was still tensed up, but he managed to give Iker a smile and a tight nod. Then he looked down at his bag again, his fingers idly playing with the zippered edges. He pursed his lips a few times. “You wanna freak out? I can go close the door.”

Iker blinked. “What? Where…”

“Look, I just…” Then Victor gave his bag a frustrated sigh. He prodded at the zipper a couple more times before finally stuffing the bag away from him. “Ten minutes being the sane one’s not gonna hurt me.”

“Well, you’ve been the sane one plenty of times, so I believe you,” Iker said slowly, still trying to figure out what this was and where they were going with it. He rubbed at the side of his neck, wondering if Iniesta would consider it his fault if Victor managed to talk himself into an argument, and then remembered what else Iniesta had said. “Is this about—did Xavi talk—look, whatever Xavi said—”

“What?” For a second they stared at each other. Then Victor abruptly dropped off his heels and sat down. He was shaking his head so it took some squinting for Iker to realize the man was smiling, not scowling. “Okay. Okay, look, I’m just—I’m—next weekend, can we not do this?”

Iker didn’t answer right away. He didn’t know what the hell to answer. But he saw Victor flinch and he grabbed the other man’s arm. “I—yeah, sure. Of course. Like we have to wait around in some haunted house every weekend.”

A weird noise escaped Victor, not exactly a chuckle. He was still looking like Iker was going to…to leave, maybe, but the muscle under Iker’s hand was slowly relaxing. Then Victor glanced down at Iker’s grip on him. He pressed his lips together, then breathed out a little unevenly through his mouth.

“I don’t really want to do this, but I don’t really want to go home and just sit there again,” Iker said quietly. The corner of his mouth quirked. “Anyway, you’re all staying, so if I went home and something happened, it’d be…okay, bad joke. Sorry.”

“S’okay,” Victor muttered, though he had to take a couple breaths before the tension drained enough for him to go on. He shifted so that he was leaning against Iker, moving his arm in a weird way—at least, it looked weird till he got his hand around onto Iker’s wrist. Then it made sense. “You know I do like you, right?”

Iker looked at the door, which was half-open. Through it he could see the others moving around, getting their gear together. They were taking a while to get flashlights, he thought. “Well, I kind of figured, since we make out more than Villa and Silva do.”

“Casillas,” Victor sighed, rolling his eyes. He went and put his head on Iker’s shoulder anyway. “It wasn’t…you have a nice place.” He started picking at his sneaker with his free hand. “I was just still getting used to having you around.”

“You mean in your place?” Iker asked after a moment. The side of his neck was getting tickled badly by Victor’s hair, which really shouldn’t be as soft as it was, but he tried to ignore it. Understanding Victor was a bit of a mind-trick at the best of times, which did not include when Victor was actively trying to explain something to him.

Victor lifted his head. Caught Iker’s shiver and amusement flickered through his eyes, but after that he looked nervous again. His fingers tightened and loosened and tightened around Iker’s wrist. “I—yeah.”

“So you’re going to stop yelling at me for messing up the couch?” Iker said. He cursed himself for being too quick when he saw Victor’s lips tighten. And then Victor dropped his hand and hit his shoulder, and Iker was almost too relieved to wince.

“No, I’ll mess up your damn couch, so you can scrub that thing down as much as I do,” Victor retorted. Then he stiffened a little, checking Iker’s face. “I get to come over now, right?”

“You could before, and you can do whatever you want now, you know. Nobody’s making you.” Iker grinned at the other man, then looped his arm around Victor’s neck while Victor was still trying to decide whether he was going to be worried or annoyed about that. Gave himself a sore cheek to match his sore arm when Victor’s head knocked into him, but Victor at least didn’t feel like a goalpost this time. The other man was leaning into him. “Whatever, okay? I can tell you what I’d like, but you know where you can tell me to go with that. I’m still going to harass you.”

Victor laughed, and then deliberately rubbed the top of his head into Iker’s neck, damn him. He was lucky Iker didn’t crack his chin down on Victor’s skull, for—Iker jerked again. This time his foot slid into the flashlights, making them clink. Victor looked over, then at Iker, like he hadn’t just put his hand on Iker’s crotch. “So what would you like?” he asked.

“For you to not remind me of Silva,” Iker blurted out. Then he closed his eyes. “Shit. Um…”

“Casillas, you are a fucking asshole sometimes,” Victor said, right up against Iker’s face.

By the time Iker got his eyes open, Victor was kissing him, and well, he might as well have kept them shut. He knocked into the flashlights again, then got his leg out of them and around so he could put both his hands up without losing his balance. One hand went into Victor’s hair, pushing it out of the way so Iker could see the man’s face when Victor pulled back.

The other one got to Victor’s shoulder a little late, plucking pretty pathetically at the other man’s shirt as he looked up at Iker. All hazy behind his lashes, like the muggy end of a slow summer day, and the curve of his smile like the bend in the air when the heat rose off the ground. “Silva doesn’t grab Villa’s ass in public.”

“God, he’d better not. I do not need to know more about those two than I already do.” Iker ran his hand up the line of Victor’s shoulder, then turned it so he could brush one finger over Victor’s mouth. The fingertip pushed down on Victor’s lip, just feeling a little of the softer, wetter underside, and then he let it fall as Victor pushed closer. Put his hand on Victor’s side, then moved it back and down to the man’s ass. “Also, _now_ ass-grabbing is relevant. And you don’t want me to harass you about it in public, should stop wearing tight jeans.”

“You really want me to do that?” They kissed again, Victor flicking his tongue across the front of Iker’s mouth, and then Victor dropped his head to snicker against Iker’s throat. He kept crawling onto Iker, so Iker had to hook two fingers over the man’s waistband just to keep his hand on that ass. Slid his hand back onto Iker’s thigh.

Iker rolled his eyes. “Of course not.” Shifted _hard_ as Victor abruptly put weight on the heel of his hand, leveraging it just _there_ and God, goddamn it, they did have to stop doing this in places like here. If only because it was too damn frustrating. “Okay, but maybe I should, um, not…”

“Whatever,” Victor muttered, and Iker could feel his lashes moving as the man rolled _his_ eyes. And his hand, right over Iker’s rising cock. “You just fucking think you’re too much of a nice boy for it.”

“Jesus. Why—why does everybody think I’m the perverted one—shit. Okay, wait, shit, Vic—Victor, damn it.” Licking his goddamn neck, right inside the collar of Iker’s shirt, and in a couple moments Iker was going to…to think about them being in a haunted house, in a haunted fucking house that _Xabi_ fucking ice king Alonso lived in, and…damn it. “Ghosts?”

“If they’re gonna get pissy, they might as well do it for a good reason.” Victor kept nosing at Iker’s neck, just playing, same way his fingers were just flexing, just messing around, making Iker incredibly uncomfortable in the worst fucking amazing way. “Anyway, would like to see one drag you off when I’m—”

Iker tried. He made himself stop groping Victor’s ass. Couldn’t quite manage to grab Victor’s hand instead, but he did think about it. “This is a really, really _weird_ thing to get hot over.”

“I’m not getting excited over stupid fucking _ghosts_.” The edge to Victor’s voice made Iker wince, even before Victor moved his grip and changed its pressure to hold, using Iker’s thigh to prop himself up instead of to make things fun. He stared down at Iker, then rolled his eyes again. “Okay. It just—last time, I freaked out enough to realize you weren’t trying to be a dick to me.”

“Well, to be honest, I was at a couple points. Sorry.” Iker watched Victor’s eyes, realized he’d read them wrong and almost apologized again. He managed to catch himself and instead pulled his hand out of Victor’s hair, but left it up against Victor’s face, keeping the strands clear of it. “I’m pretty sure that we’re not seeing each other now because we’re traumatized from _that_. At least, I’m not.”

“No, I know, I just…get worried over things sometimes.” Victor shrugged like he was pulling a load of rocks onto his back. “It’s…hard to get kicked out of somewhere you’ve never been.”

“Okay.” It took a couple seconds for Iker to actually parse out what Victor had meant, but it felt like he needed to put in a placeholder, and—okay, then. On some level, Iker had had a feeling that that was what it was about—they _were_ getting to know each other—but on another, he still just was surprised that anybody would—could live that defensively all the time. But…okay, that was Victor. They were getting to know each other. “Okay, well, then I won’t kick you out.” He shook his head, cutting off the obvious retort. “I’m not calling us soul mates, Valdés. I’m just saying, if it gets that nasty, I promise to do it somewhere that’s not my place. Okay?”

For a couple moments Victor stared at him. It wasn’t that the other man didn’t believe him, but it did look like Victor wished he didn’t. And then it didn’t, and Victor was shaking his head and maybe even grinning. “You are so—okay, well, I promise to stop being annoyed when your neighbors go on about your ass.”

“Hey, I don’t remember actually complaining about that.”

“ _Iker_.” Victor kissed him, exasperated. And then again, not so exasperated, their hands starting to slide to where it felt warm, felt good and comfortable, felt like whatever the hell they did was going to work out. “For the record,” he mumbled, pushing more of his weight onto Iker’s legs, “Xavi just told me, don’t let him be a jackass too often.”

Iker managed to dredge up a fleeting idea that he should be miffed, in between curling his fingers down on the back of Victor’s neck and finding out what the dip behind Victor’s ear tasted like today. “Nobody cares about me, those assholes. See if I ever get people making threats on my be—”

He sensed something, maybe the twist of the floorboards, and jammed his foot up the door just in time to keep it in place as somebody hammered on the other side of it. Against him Victor went still and cold, and yeah, Iker was thinking—thinking _Christ really_ and _please no no_ and a little bit of _knew this was a stupid idea so asking for it honestly_. And then they both heard the frustrated, completely human exhale on the other side of the door, and Victor slackened out on top of Iker, cursing quietly in Catalan.

“Iker? Iker, are you two okay in there?” Xabi made it sound so diplomatic, the desperate need to know.

“Yes,” Iker snapped. “What?”

Somebody out there coughed. “They’re having sex.”

“We are not!” Victor finally hauled himself up and sat back on his heels. He rumpled his hair, then irritably began to pull his shirt back down his chest. “Look, two seconds so we can pack and—”

“Okay, well, then you were trying to, but oh, my God, even David’s not this bad, and I didn’t have steam cleaners in my contact list before we—ow!” Silva sounded genuinely in pain. “What was that for? I’m not the one with a haunting kink.”

“No, but you two sure as hell kink on Iker yelling at David and that’s pretty fucking weird too.” Then Xavi opened the door. He looked down at Iker and Victor, then over his shoulder—Silva could really blush when he put his mind to it, Iker idly observed—and then back at Iker. “I’m trying to help?”

Iker just grabbed his backpack and a flashlight. “I’m not even. You all can dick around with each other, but I’m going upstairs to talk to this stupid ghost, poltergeist, whatever.”

* * *

The attic was…dusty. If the ghost did come at them, Iker thought irritably, trying to squish his nose into his wrist, they might have to sneeze holy water onto it. “So where is this box?”

“Locker,” Llorente called up. 

It was too crowded for them to all go up, not to mention that being a stupid way to put all their eggs in one basket, so he and Silva and Iniesta were waiting in the bedroom below by the ladder. He was supposed to do his best to make sure the ladder didn’t lift up by itself or do anything else that would keep them from getting back down, and Silva and Iniesta were doing the exorcism part. Maybe. Personally Iker had his doubts about that “exorcism” Silva had helped with—anything that ended with a Joaquín anecdote generally wasn’t to be trusted—but he’d been forced to concede when Xavi had stated he’d been too far away to get details on the one Hierro had done.

“What?” Victor called back. He probably should have stayed downstairs with Iniesta—there was bravery and then there was just ignoring where your lines were drawn—but he’d clamped one hand onto Iker’s left arm and it was providing a great incentive for them to find this thing before he lost that limb. “Where?”

“It’s a seaman’s locker. Like one of those old-fashioned chests.” Xabi had gone over to open the shutters on the windows and now was picking his way back through the uneven stacks of boxes, chairs, and books. He suddenly cursed and hopped and they all looked at him. Then he straightened himself up with a diffident shrug. “Tennis racket. Sorry.”

Victor blew out his breath and tried to shift around Iker without letting go of Iker’s arm. “So it’s pretty big?”

“Decent-sized,” Xabi answered, moving his hands apart to show. “But I think we might’ve piled some boxes on top of it. We were running out of room.”

Xavi muttered something in acknowledgment and dropped down onto his knees, peering at the lowest level of the stacks around them. He absently spritzed holy water around, then waved his hand in apology when he got Iker’s leg. 

Well, they could do it that way. Or they could…look for a stack that looked about that size, and then check it out. Which was what Iker was going to do, even if that meant that he had to carry Victor over there. “Can you loosen up a little?” he hissed. He spotted a likely stack and began the slow, painful process of twisting them around to face it. “I need that arm.”

“Oh.” From the face Victor pulled, he’d actually forgotten he was holding onto it. He dropped it and watched Iker go off a few steps, and then scuffed back up to Iker’s left side. “Is that—whoa.”

Something had just brushed up against Iker’s leg as he’d put it out for the next step. He instinctively pulled it back, only for the damn thing to brush up against the opposite side of his leg. Like it was moving. Iker stiffened and tried to hop and look down all at the same time, and okay, he was glad Victor was there to grab him right then.

They scuffled in place a couple seconds before Victor got his hand under Iker’s elbow and pushed up, getting Iker back on his feet. He was saying something, but Iker was more in favor of looking all around their legs to see whether he could find anything.

Nothing. As in, no tennis racket or anything else that might explain what the hell that had been. Either Iker had surpassed Barcelona’s midfield in finding ways to trip over nothing, or the weird shit had started up again. “Um. Hey, so I think—”

“This looks like it, doesn’t it?” Crawling up from behind, Xavi stuck his arm past Iker’s leg and poked at something hidden under a pile of plastic-wrapped clothing. Then he hit it with his hand and it did sound like wood.

Victor hissed and yanked at Iker’s arm. When Iker yanked it back, the other man looked marginally sorry, and then he went back to looking frantically around the place. He did have a good point; they didn’t actually want to make the ghost upset if they didn’t have to. But he could’ve made it without the umpteenth try at dislocating Iker’s shoulder. “Maybe. Let’s get this stuff off,” Iker suggested.

He reached out for the clothes and got hit from three different directions. Iker looked at his sanctified, damp back of hand, then sighed and shook off the water onto the clothes. He stepped back to make room for Xavi, who stood up and sprayed more water around, then began helping Iker pull away the clothes.

Underneath them was a battered-looking wooden chest about the size of a couple microwaves put together. It had metal studs and metal hinges on the sides where handles probably had been, and the remains of a rusty lock in the front. When they spritzed it with more holy water, nothing happened.

Well, it was probably a little ridiculous to expect the thing to start smoking, or catch on fire like—like Hollywood vampires, but Iker still would’ve thought something would have happened if the chest was really it. But the wood just got a little darker as the water soaked into it. 

“That’s it,” Xabi said helpfully. “We broke the lock getting it open the first time, so you can just pop it up.”

“What if it’s not empty anymore?” Victor snapped.

Xabi blinked at him. “What would be in it? We didn’t put anything inside.”

“Well, when was the last time you looked?” Victor continued. 

He was being a little sharp, considering it was Xabi, but Iker refrained from interrupting and just slung his arm over Victor’s shoulders, drawing them back a few centimeters. Victor was still saying something about poltergeists and moving objects, but he didn’t give Iker any trouble. He also wasn’t making any moves towards the box, and neither was anyone else.

Somebody had to. Dragging this out was just going to make it worse, and—Iker got a better grip on Victor’s shoulders, leaned back and quickly kicked up the chest’s top before he could think about it anymore. Xavi yelped, glanced into the chest and then flinched away. Which made Iker hesitate, because if _Xavi_ couldn’t take it, then…it had to be pretty…

…pretty nothing. As in, nothing in there. The chest was empty.

“Weird,” Xavi muttered, blushing slightly. When Iker caught his eye, he just shrugged and ducked his head so he could scratch the back. 

Iker owed him _at least_ for his sudden interest in everybody’s sex lives, but they were thisclose to getting this nonsense over with, so Iker let that one go. “Okay. Well, let’s get it downstairs.”

And that was when the clothes blew up in their faces. Suddenly Iker was sucking on plastic and it was up his nose too and he couldn’t _breathe_ —he clawed it off his face and then stumbled sideways, gasping, only to have something soft smack into his side. He threw out his arm and the thing wrapped around it, stretching back towards him, like he was in some giant sling. Iker twisted and somehow got out of it, and then kept going down till he hit the floor on his hands and knees, vague memories of fire drills coming up. If it was hard to breathe, keep your head down because—because it was harder to get to you that way.

Xavi was cursing like crazy, and Iker could hear Alonso shouting to the people down below. He didn’t hear Victor but he crawled back towards the chest and on the second time he put out his hand, he got a leg. He half-dragged, half-climbed it, shoving plastic out of the way, till he got to Victor’s wild-eyed face. Then something whipped by _just_ overhead and he had to duck down till they could’ve been kissing. If they weren’t being bombarded with crappy clothes by a ghost.

“—fucking _shit_ —” Victor grated out. His fingers scrabbled at Iker, then clamped down wherever they were.

Iker just nodded, trying to squint past all the flapping plastic. He glimpsed the chest, thought he saw something stick out of it and then drop back inside, and then had to dodge another flying suit. The entrance to the attic was maybe three meters behind them, and they had to get the chest there.

“Roll over,” he muttered. When Victor didn’t move, Iker worked his arm across the other man till he hit the floor again. Then he slithered over Victor and tried reaching for the chest.

If the damn thing had still had its handle, he would have gotten it. But it didn’t, and then Victor realized what he was doing and tried to pull him back. “Casillas—”

“Get it downstairs, get the damn thing _out_ , okay?” Iker hissed back through gritted teeth. He nearly got slashed in the face by a passing coathanger and shoved himself down barely in time. His heart leaped into his head, or at least sounded like that, and for a moment things got hazy.

Somebody shook him. Pushed him. He saw the side of the chest coming up fast and lashed out with his hand. Caught the hinge and just _yanked_ the damn thing, and then kind of remembered he needed to twist too to get it going where he wanted to go.

Victor was already slewing them around, thankfully, and he might’ve gotten a smack of the palm to the bottom of the crate. Iker wasn’t looking too closely because his goddamn arm was overextended and the chest was heavy and not moving fast enough. And then the momentum caught up to it and he felt that second where the chest’s weight disappeared, and the hinge slipped out of his fingers as the chest kept moving. Sliding till it went over the trapdoor, crashed into the far edge and then began to tumble down the ladder.

And then Iker’s arm was on fire. Burning from wrist to shoulder, where it felt like somebody had replaced the rotator cuff with a plate of red-hot iron, and when he pulled in his arm to his chest—not thinking, obviously—it just was. Bad. It was bad. Jesus.

“Iker?” Victor whispered.

“Is that—is that fucking thing—” it was quieter, Iker thought, and that had to be a good sign “—are they—”

“Silva says they got it!” Llorente hollered up.

Iker slumped in relief. Then swore and tensed up again, half-pulling off of Victor. “Oh, fucking _God_.” He heard the rise in Victor’s voice as the other man asked him what was wrong and grimaced. “My arm. Threw it out.”

“Oh,” Victor breathed. “Oh, okay.”

No, not really, Iker did not snap. In the grand scheme of things, pulling all the muscles in his shoulder wasn’t nearly as bad as getting his arm…bitten off or possessed or something like that, and of course that was what Victor meant. Though Iker couldn’t help thinking that the grand scheme of things still had a shitty sense of humor, what with fucking up his arm _again_ with stupid ghosts, and God, it really hurt.

Victor was looking at him. “You want help?”

“Like painkillers?” Iker muttered.

Rolling his eyes, Victor reached for him. Then the other man stopped. He looked at Iker, his brow creasing a little, like he was sizing something up and what, exactly, he had to size up was beyond Iker. Nothing but a man lying on a floor here.

“Saving the day again,” Victor finally said.

“You were around, too.” Iker forgot, somehow, and shrugged, and then swore himself silly, like that was going to help. “Shit. Okay, yes, I’d like up and—”

Victor kissed him. Somewhere in the background, Iker heard a startled cough from Xabi and then a whoop from Xavi. He snorted, winced, and then stupidly kind of wished Victor hadn’t chosen right now to be the first time he was going to publicly mack on Iker. Then he stopped being stupid, did his best to ignore his hurting arm and kissed Victor back.

* * *

They sent it to Figo. Silva might say that the chest was exorcised, and nothing odd had happened in the two weeks since, but nobody wanted that thing around. Figo could handle the chest, and anyway, even Raúl had thought it was a good idea. Which was a little bit weird, as was how gooey-eyed Villa got when Raúl had said that, but…Iker was leaving that to Silva.

The Basque student group got to keep its lease, though it wasn’t because of any of the video they’d shot. Well, not directly—Iker did think Raúl would have believed them even without seeing it, but he supposed it didn’t hurt. He also hadn’t known that Raúl would get that upset over him showing up in a sling, which was only for a couple days while they checked that his arm wouldn’t accidentally pop out of the socket, or that the man didn’t mind participating in the occasional blackmailing incident. The look on Javi’s face when Hierro had shown up and gravely announced that, despite various disciplinary incidents with individual members, the Basque group as a whole deserved the support of the whole university was going to be a fond memory of Iker’s for a while.

“As if he doesn’t scare the shit out of you at least once a week,” Victor mumbled into Iker’s neck. Then he kept nosing there, not apparently having any goals in mind, just rubbing his cheek against Iker’s throat.

He was warm and loose-jointed over Iker, with the exception of his one hand that still touched Iker’s shoulder like it was made of glass. It’d been a couple weeks. Iker had even carried up the damn groceries only a few hours ago, because Victor still wouldn’t let Iker carry his camera bag. “Looking into mind-reading now?”

“Don’t need to when you’re so smug I can hear you from here.” Victor lifted his head long enough to snort at Iker’s irritation, then put it back down on Iker’s other shoulder. “So you haven’t heard from him?”

“Figo? Not unless you count him inviting us to check out a haunting in Valencia with him. Which I already told him to stuff up his ass,” Iker said. He lifted one hand and then let it hang from the wrist so that his fingertips were just touching Victor’s back. They rose as the muscles there bunched, then rode the drop as Victor slowly relaxed. “Nope, think I’m okay with a career in sports journalism instead.”

Victor snorted again, then turned it into a snicker as he stretched out his back, arching up a little bit. He twisted when Iker slid his hand down that back and in between Victor’s buttocks, then—pressed back, hitching up his knees so he was straddling Iker. “And, you know, not getting cut off by every fucking person we know?”

“Yeah, that too,” Iker grinned, pulling him back down. They made out a little, Iker not doing anything more with his hand than cupping the inside of Victor’s thigh, till the slip-start of their bodies began getting a little less comfortable. Then Iker started fumbling on his dresser for wherever he’d put the damn—

He stared at Victor, who just shrugged as he tossed it over his shoulder and then reached between Iker’s legs. “You said I should get to know the place, since I’m coming over now.”

“I don’t—” Iker hissed, grabbed a double handful of bed, and saw Victor checking. He made himself breathe out. Remember that he still had Victor’s ass in hand, and used that hold to get Victor close enough for another kiss. “Well. Okay, yeah. You—shit—you find the—”

Victor shook his head. “And you think Xavi’s got a perverted mind. Pot, kettle, Casillas?”

Iker just shut the man up.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in 2012.


End file.
